Since the reemergence of Israel on the world scene when it became a state in 1948, subsequently regaining control of Jerusalem in 1967, there has been a growing change of heart among Christian believers—whether mainstream, evangelical, or charismatic—toward the Jews. In an article in Charisma magazine in 1996, David Aikman stated:
Many Christians have begun to experience a love for the Jews that has nothing to do with the End Times, but which is almost certainly the work of the Holy Spirit. It is thus important for all Christians…to be respectful of Jewish feelings in light of the uglier side of Christian history.1
In this chapter we are going to take a look at “the uglier side of Christian history.” Although the Jewish people were persecuted and mistreated before Jesus Christ lived and died on earth, the evil of anti-Semitism had not gripped the world in its grasp. That evil was birthed to life as Jesus was giving His life on a rugged cross on the lonely hill of Calvary.
We are going to explore the evil of anti-Semitism in this chapter because it is critically important that we learn to rid ourselves of its hold once and for all—not just for the sake of the Jews, but for our own sakes. Unless we repent of this devastating, sinful attitude, we cannot expect the blessing of God to flow in our lives.
When God called Abraham out of his country to a land God would give him, God gave him a promise not only for him…not only for the Jews, God’s chosen people…but a promise that would affect every other nation on the earth forever. God said:
I will bless you
And make your name great;
And you shall be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you
And I will curse him who curses you;
And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
—GENESIS 12:2–3
The Word could not be plainer: if you want the blessing of God upon your life, you must bless Israel, not curse it with hatred, persecution, and murder.
It is Jesus Himself who taught us to love, not hate. In Matthew 19:19, He instructs to “love your neighbor as yourself.” As He prepared to give His life as a sacrifice for our sins, He said: “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.…You are my friends if you do whatever I command you” (John 15:12, 14, emphasis added). He was even more direct in Matthew 5:44–45, where He instructed:
But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.
Hatred is simply not an option for people who want to serve God and have His blessing upon their lives. Yet it was the crucifixion of the Son of God that has given rise to the hatred and persecution of God’s own people.
For centuries, the Jews have been beaten, murdered, robbed, and raped while fanatics have screamed, “You are the Christ killers!” This vicious label has been tied about the necks of the Jewish people since shortly after the death of Christ, causing Europe and the Middle East to turn red with Jewish blood.
Let’s take a closer look at what has occasioned such venomous hatred to be expressed toward God’s chosen people. Perhaps the one question that has caused such virulent hatred to be loosed is this: Who killed Jesus?
EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF THE CRUCIFIXION
The Book of Matthew gives us two important facts about the death of Christ:
• There was a crucifixion plot.
• The plot was carried out by the high priest Caiaphas, a political appointee of Rome by Herod the Great, who had conquered Rome before the birth of Christ. (See Matthew 26:3.)
As a people, the Jews had nothing to do with the political conspiracy against Jesus Christ. The high priest Caiaphas was appointed by Herod to do the will of Rome. He was an illegitimate priest who was not selected by the Jewish people to do their will.
Into this political setting came a Jewish rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth. The Jews were looking for a deliverer who would lead a revolt to break the oppressive chains of Rome. The popularity of Jesus spread like chained lightning. Anyone who could heal and raise people from the dead could heal wounded soldiers and raise dead troops back to life to fight the pagan Romans.
Jesus was a very serious political threat to Herod and his stooge high priest Caiaphas. So they entered into a politically inspired plot to have Jesus of Nazareth killed Roman style…the crucifixion!
The high priest and his circle of religious conspirators had no mandate from the Jewish people; rather, they feared the people. They most certainly did not represent the one million Jews that were living in Israel at the time, much less all the Jews that lived in Egypt or were scattered over the Roman Empire. These religious rogues were a miniscule handful led by the high priests to do Rome’s bidding.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus Himself identifies His killers: “Then He took the twelve aside and said to them, ‘Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished. For He will be delivered to the Gentiles [the Romans] and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again” (Luke 18:31–33, emphasis added).
The Bible text is perfectly clear. Jesus was crucified by Rome as a political insurrectionist considered too dangerous to live. He was a threat to Herod’s grip on Palestine. He was a threat to the high priest. The Calvary plot among Herod’s inner circle produced the Roman crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. It had nothing to do with the will of the Jewish people as a civilization.
The historical fact is that three out of four Jews did not live in Israel when Jesus began His ministry. Nine out of ten of the Jews in Israel during His ministry lived outside of Jerusalem.2
The justice of God would never permit judgment for the sins of a handful of people to be passed to a civilization of people. In the last breath of His earthly life, Jesus forgave even the high priest and his conspirators: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34.)
If God has forgiven…why can’t Christianity?
JUST HOW JEWISH WAS JESUS?
It is essential for all anti-Semites to separate Jesus from His Jewish roots. Why? If you can separate Jesus from the Jewish people, hatred becomes fashionable, and anti-Semitism becomes a Christian virtue. An anti-Semite is a dead Christian whose hatred has strangled his faith. Like a chameleon, anti-Semitism can masquerade alternately as doing the will of God or political ideology.
If Jesus can be separated from His Jewish roots, Christians can continue to praise the dead Jews of the past (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) while hating the Goldbergs across the street. But when you see the Jewish people as the family of our Lord, they become our extended family whom we are commanded to love unconditionally.
Most Christians think of Jesus and His twelve disciples as Christians before their time. Not so! Jesus was not a Christian. He was born to Jewish parents. He was dedicated in the Jewish tradition, reared studying the words of Moses and the prophets of Israel, and became a Jewish rabbi. He died with a sign over his head on which was written in three languages, “This is the King of the Jews.”
It was Jesus of Nazareth, this Jewish rabbi, who, with the following words, instructed His twelve Jewish disciples to take the light of the gospel to the Gentile world:
Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
—MARK 16:15
Before His death, Jesus agonized in prayer to His Father, God, asking God to protect and guide His disciples as they stepped into the world with the message of peace and salvation. He prayed for the unity of all who would believe in Him with these words:
As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.…I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.
—JOHN 17:18, 20–21
But the evil of hatred for God’s people, the Jews, has hindered this prayer from God’s own Son from being fulfilled.
The first-century Gentiles and Jews who followed Christ met together in unity. They sang the same songs. They kept the same festivals. They had the same rabbi—Jesus of Nazareth.
Then came the crucifixion. Jesus of Nazareth ascended into heaven in the sight of the twelve apostles, and the church of Jesus Christ was left alone. One of the first church problems was what to do with the Gentile believers who were worshiping with the Jewish believers. Should the Gentiles be circumcised? Should the Gentiles keep the Law of Moses? How strict were the Jews going to be with the new Gentile believers who had just come out of absolute paganism to follow Jesus of Nazareth?
This is when the Jerusalem Council, as recorded in Acts 15, occurred. James, the brother of Jesus Christ, stated that the Gentile followers of Christ had to follow some strict guidelines in order to continue worshiping with their Jewish fellow believers. It would not be necessary for them to be circumcised, but they must stop committing fornication, and they must stop eating meats that were offered to idols. (See Acts 15:24–29.)
For a while, the Jews and Gentile Christians continued to worship together in harmony. Then came the Romans under the leadership of Titus, bringing death and famine like none could have possibly imagined.
THE SIEGE OF JERUSALEM
The siege of Jerusalem by Titus began in April of A.D. 70, during the Passover. The armies of Romans surrounded the city of Jerusalem, trapping tens of thousands of Jews behind the walls of the sacred city. The Romans closed all exits from Jerusalem, even the tunnels under the wall, and the siege continued for months. All hope for escape was lost, and a horrible famine resulted for those remaining in the city. The horrors of the famine in the city of Jerusalem during the siege of Titus reached far beyond the imagination of mortals to comprehend. All human emotions yield to hunger, and thus it was reported by Josephus:
Wives snatched food from their husbands, children from their fathers, and, most pitiful of all, mothers snatched food out of the very mouths of their infants; while their dearest ones were dying in their arms, they did not hesitate to deprive them of the life-giving morsels.3
After months of the siege, the brutal power of the Roman army crushed Jerusalem. Titus and the Roman army set the gates of the temple on fire and ordered the complete destruction of the city of Jerusalem, even to the tearing down of the walls so that not one stone was left on top of the other. Jesus had prophesied this event in Matthew 24:2, when He said, “Do you not see all these things? Assuredly, I say to you, not one stone shall be left here upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” It literally came to pass when Titus destroyed Jerusalem.
Josephus records, “The number of those that were carried captive during this whole war was collected to be ninety-seven thousand as was the number of those that perished during the whole siege, eleven-hundred thousand.”4
Eleven hundred thousand equals 1.1 million people dead at the hands of the Romans, mostly through brutal starvation.
Most of the ninety-seven thousand prisoners were taken to Rome where they were fed to lions to amuse the bloodthirsty Roman citizens in the Roman coliseum, or forced to become gladiators and fight to the death. Some, who were believed to be criminals, were burned alive.
GENTILE CHRISTIANS SEPARATE FROM JEWS
Before Titus instructed the Roman army to close the gates and stop any people from escaping from the city of Jerusalem, he had made it known to those behind the walls that anyone desiring to leave the city could do so without harm prior to the commencement of battle. The Hellenistic Christians of Greek influence, who resided in the city, had no loyalty to the city of Jerusalem. With tens of thousands of people lying dead in the streets from starvation and thousands more thrown over the walls, causing a putrid smell to cover the city, the Hellenistic Christians accepted Titus’s invitation to leave Jerusalem and went to a town in Transjordan called Pella. Thus this terrible invasion from Titus had brought about the separation of Gentiles and Jews who were followers of Jesus Christ, and that separation has remained until this day. With that separation, the seeds of anti-Semitism—begun centuries before when the Jews began to be persecuted by the former inhabitants of the Promised Land, and watered by the controversy of who was responsible for the death of Christ—broke ground and began to bear its ugly fruit of violence.
THE JEWISH FORTRESS OF MASADA
After the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Masada was the last flickering flame of freedom for the Jewish people. Masada is located twenty miles south of Sdom on the Dead Sea and rises thirteen hundred feet into the sky with a flat top of one-half mile.
Built by Herod the Great in 40 B.C. as a fortress, after the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of Titus it was occupied by a small group of Jewish patriots who escaped from Jerusalem under the leadership of Eleazar. He was the nephew of Menahem, who had earlier defeated the Romans who occupied it, thus putting it back in Jewish hands. For nearly three years, Eleazar and the Jewish patriots held out against the Roman legion that had encircled the mountain, trying in vain to storm the mountain fortress.
By A.D. 73, the Roman army under the leadership of Hadrian had grown to ten thousand men, bivouacked in eight camps in the valley. The Romans started to build an assault ramp to the top, using thousands of slaves, many of whom were Jewish. After nine months the ramp was complete, and the Romans succeeded in moving a battering ram against the wall. They broke through the stone wall, but the defenders had managed to build a wall of earth and wood that was flexible and hard to break. Eventually, the Romans managed to destroy it by fire and decided to enter the fortress the next day.
That night Eleazar gathered all the defenders, giving an impassioned plea that they should all commit suicide by their own hand rather than allow the Romans to rape their wives and daughters and place their sons in chains of eternal slavery. When the Romans came in full battle dress the next morning, they were met by the thunderous sound of silence. They discovered that nearly all of the 960 Jews who had held out for three years had committed suicide. Two women and five children, who had hidden in a cave, came out and informed the Romans of this daring act of freedom. It is a moment in Jewish history that will be remembered for eternity.
I have taken thousands of pilgrims to Masada to fully understand Israel’s past and present. The access to Masada from the east is by a road going from Sdom to Jericho along the edge of the Dead Sea, the lowest elevation on Planet Earth. Many believe the sulfuric odor of the Dead Sea and its low elevation bear witness to the fact this was probably the place where God blasted Sodom and Gomorrah with hailstones. The city was so totally demolished that archaeologists have never been able to find Sodom and Gomorrah to this day.
When the road turns toward Masada, it rises hundreds of feet up out of the Judean Desert and can be seen for miles. You can travel to the top of Masada either by walking up the ancient, aptly named “Snake Path” or by taking a cable car to the top. I highly recommend that you take the cable car.
In the twentieth century, Masada became a symbol of courage for the emerging Jewish state. In 1949, at the end of the War of Independence, the Israeli flag was hoisted on Masada’s summit as a symbol for the Jewish people that they would now be free from any form of tyranny or terrorism.
Yet, as Iran prepares nuclear weapons, there are few doubts those weapons may be used on Israel first. But Israel is not obligated to commit national suicide for world peace. Israel has the right of every democracy to defend itself against tyranny and terrorism! They did so at Masada…and they will do so in the future.
When you go to Israel—don’t miss Masada!