Culture & Christianity: The Allen Jackson Podcast - Here’s What Christians Get Wrong About Judaism

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Have Christians always responded to Israel and the Jewish people in the right way? How should Christ-followers confront the reality of anti-Semitism while holding firmly to the truth that salvation comes through Jesus alone? In this conversation, Pastor Allen Jackson challenges the Church to reject arrogance, examine history honestly, and seek a biblically-grounded understanding of Israel and God’s covenant purposes. Rather than allowing culture, politics, or selective narratives to shape our perspectives, this episode calls believers to engage with humility, courage, and compassion in a complex and often emotional discussion.

Well, welcome to culture and Christianity. This is kind of a special session for me. I'm a bit excited about it. I'm prepared for it. I'm going to read more scripture than you're accustomed to me reading. And in some respects, it got focused for me last week. I suppose I had 10 different people reach out to me with questions around anti-Semitism, hating the Jewish people. And most of them were being influenced by a lot of voices in the current.

ecosystem, whether it's whether you live in social media or you're following things through the church or maybe you're watching some current events, people who have opinions and influencers and a lot of conversations, a lot of opinions. And the people reaching out to me were looking for resources trying to sort it out. And while I was passing out resources, I thought maybe a shorter way to do that would be to take a bit of time and for us to talk about it. So the topic really has to do with hating the Jewish people. is it appropriate? Is the modern nation of Israel a pretender? Should they be disregarded? Do the Jewish people

have a place in God's unfolding purposes as a people, or do they just have to get folded into the narrative of contemporary Christianity? And I want to kind of begin to walk through that. And I'm not going to start by trying to do a verse-by-verse comparison of kind of the proof text that are the typical talking points. I probably would start with the, you know, we meet Abraham in the book of Genesis. The book of Genesis introduces the big rock ideas of the Bible. If you will accept the book of Genesis as true, the rest of the Bible makes sense. If you reject the book of Genesis, the rest of the Bible feels like a farce. Like, I'm really not sure why you would read it if you reject the book of Genesis. If you don't believe Genesis 1 that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, why would you trust

him for your eternity? If God doesn't have the power, and the authority to be the creator of all things, it would be imprudent to trust him with your eternity. But those big rock ideas are unfolded in Genesis. The first 11 chapters are universal. They deal with all of humanity, global themes, floods, those kind of things. But when we get to Genesis 12, the narrative changes. And it's a significant change in the unfolding story of the Bible. We're introduced to Abram in Mesopotamia. And God says to him, you need to leave the place. you live and go to the land that I'll show you and I'll make you, most of you know the story. I'll bless those that bless you, curse those that curse you.

And for a lot of people, that's all they know. That's kind of the verse they know. That's their whole filter through which they see the nation of Israel and the Jewish people. Not a bad filter, but it's an incomplete filter. To me, that feels a lot like, you know, something you might learn in Sunday school when you're a child. And it's the truth, but it's not the larger picture of the truth. There's not the nuanced truth. It's kind of like I also learned in Sunday school as a child that Jesus loves me.

And I believe that's true today. I believe Jesus does love me. But that's not all the information I need to lead an effective, fruitful life as a Christ follower. And if the only thing you know is that promise God made to Abram regarding his descendants that would be as numerous as the sand on the seashore or the stars in the sky, then you really aren't prepared or I'm not prepared to walk through this question around the Jewish people and God's purposes for them, there is far more to it. And so often we hear this in the public square, and that verse is quoted.

And then the person who doesn't agree with kind of mocks the person, and maybe appropriately so, because if all you know is that Jesus loves me, antagonist of Jesus, have plenty of room to make fun of us. So I want to see if I can add a little detail to that and maybe fill in a bit of the backstory. And if this helps, then I'll come back and we can go through the whole New Testament a bit more passage by passage that's relevant to this. But I'd like to start with this simple idea. And the thing that I hear most frequently from Christians, particularly, about the Jewish

people, is that the Jews rejected Jesus. With that first century audience, to whom Jesus came, he was born in Bethlehem, the beginning of the first century, and the Jewish people rejected Jesus. Therefore, God rejected them. They missed the boat. They forfeited their opportunity. They blew it. Well, it's true that some of the Jewish community rejected Jesus.

But I want to share with you some passages from the New Testament. And it's more scripture than I would normally read in one of our podcasts. Usually you have to go to a sermon to get this much scripture from me. And I'm going to offer some opinions. I don't know how much of it we'll do, but I want to see if I can make a point that becomes clear to you. It feels pretty clear to me. In Matthew chapter 4, there's 28 chapters in Matthew. So this is the first quarter.

This is pretty early in the Jesus narrative. So his reputation is going to grow much beyond this point. This is the beginning of his public ministry. It says Jesus went throughout Galilee. Galilee is a region in Israel. It's the northern part of Israel. It's the rural part. In the first century, it would have been considered the least sophisticated part.

In fact, a portion of Galilee was occupied by non-Jews. So Galilee is referred to in some places as Galilee of the Gentiles. And it's where Jesus' public ministry begins. Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases and those suffering with severe pain, the demon possessed, those having seizures and the paralyzed, and he healed them. And large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, the region across the Jordan,

followed him. Now that's a pretty important note about the response Jesus is having at the beginning of his public ministry. He hadn't gone to Jerusalem yet. He's not in the epicenter of power. He isn't challenging the religious leaders and the real financial institutions of the Jewish people. But in the more remote places, large crowds followed him from Galilee across that whole region. From the Decapolis, the Decapolis was ten cities. the majority of which, eight of which are on the side of the Jordan River where the nation Jordan is today. They're not even in modern day Israel. My point with that is from a very broad geographical region that the people are coming.

And if you don't know much about the available flights in ancient Israel, they were few and far between. If you're going to travel a large distance, you walked, you rode a donkey, maybe a camel. But, I mean, travel and transportation was far more. difficult. They came from as far away as Jerusalem. That's about a week's journey. They came from Judea, the region surrounding Jerusalem, which would have been Jerusalem and south of Jerusalem, from the region across the Jordan River. They came from Syria, north of Galilee. They came from, if we used a modern map of Israel, they came from Lebanon and Syria and Jordan and Israel to hear Jesus. The Jews in all of those places, because he's speaking in their

synagogues and preaching the good news. Jesus is very clear throughout his messaging that he came for the lost sheep of the House of Israel. He's very reluctant to engage with people other than that. So we should imagine that the majority of these people coming his way were observant Jewish people. Very large crowds. In John chapter 12 and verse 12 says the next day he's in Jerusalem by this point. This is the later in his ministry. We're a couple of years later in his ministry now. The next day, the great crowd that had come for the feast, heard that Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, and they took palm branches and went out to meet him, shouting, Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, blessed is the king of Israel. There's a large crowd that has come for one of the pilgrimage

feast to Jerusalem. And when the message goes that Jesus is approaching the city, the crowd turns away from the temple and the activity that the priest have organized to walk to the Mount of Olives and to welcome Jesus into the city. the city. You know, I think of it in terms of the kind of parades we would imagine when there are athletic teams that win championships and the cities that they represent turn out with these elaborate parades. That triumphal entry of Jesus is this enormous crowd of people welcoming Jesus as if he were a king into the city. Same chapter, John chapter 12, the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word.

Lazarus lived on the Mount of Olives, just on the opposite side of the Temple Mount. Many people, because they'd heard that he'd given this miraculous sign, went out to meet him. So the Pharisees said to one another, see, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him. So to the Pharisees, a part of the religious establishment, their perspective on Jesus, was the entire Jewish world was following him. Again, this is in the context of a very prominent belief amongst many contemporary Christians that the Jews rejected Jesus.

They wanted nothing to do with him. That he was left as a voice of one crying in the wilderness. So that was John the Baptist, the one who prepared the way for Jesus. And the crowds that went to see John the Baptist were so numerous that the power brokers in Jerusalem went out to see what John was doing, how he could be attracting people in such magnitude in such scope. John's baptizing in the Jordan River. He's 20-plus miles away from the temple in Jerusalem. The center of religious life is the temple.

It's the most beautiful building in Israel. It's the power center. It's the National Bank. John is baptizing in the Jordan River. It's a very underwhelming river. 20 miles from the temple and enormous crowds of people are going to John in the wilderness to be baptized. And the power brokers are put off by it. And they go to sea.

And John says, you bunch of snakes. produce fruit in keeping with repentance. Well, the crowds that followed Jesus were far greater than the crowds that ever followed John. So Jesus was not rejected by all the Jewish people. Luke 20, verse 19, the teachers of the law and the chief priest looked for a way to arrest Jesus because they knew that he'd spoken a parable against them, but they were afraid of the people. The religious leaders, the power brokers, wanted to destroy Jesus, but they were afraid to arrest him because he had.

had such overwhelming popular support. And it continues after Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. In Acts chapter 1, Jesus ascends back to heaven. Acts chapter 2 is the day of Pentecost. And after the Spirit of God is poured out in Jerusalem, this large crowd gathers. And Peter stands up to explain about Jesus to the Jews of Jerusalem. And he says, let all Israel be assured of this that God made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ. And when When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart, and they said to Peter and the other apostles, What shall we do? And Peter said, repent and be baptized.

Every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, Jesus the Messiah. Christ is the English equivalent of the Greek word Christos, which is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Messiah. So when you see Jesus Christ, Christ was not the family name. You're simply saying the English equivalent of Messiah. So when Peter refers to Jesus Christ, he's saying Jesus, our Messiah, for the forgiveness of your sins. And you'll receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord our God will call. With many other words, he warned them and he pleaded with him, saved yourselves from this corrupt generation.

Those who accepted his message were baptized and about 3,000 were added to their number that day. So Peter's first public sermon, after Jesus ascended back to heaven, to a Jewish community in Jerusalem, he was very harsh with them. He was not conciliatory. He said, we didn't behave well towards this man. Our rulers had him put to death. And thousands of people were willing to be publicly baptized in the name of Jesus as Messiah, in the mikhvahs, in the mikvahs, They were baptized in the places for ceremonial cleansing that surrounded the temple mount. So they didn't see this as something that separated them from Judaism.

They were acknowledging their Jewish Messiah. Again, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people in the first century did not reject Jesus. Acts chapter 5 says crowds gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those tormented by evil spirits, and all of them were healed. And the high priest and all of his associates, who were members of the party of the Sadducees, were filled with jealousy. So, again, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, they are the most influential, politically, of the Jewish community. And they had a, they would forfeit something if they acknowledged Jesus was Messiah.

They were afraid they would forfeit their place. of power. Jesus said to them, you like the choice seats in the synagogue, or you like the privilege of being treated reverentially when you're in public. And he said, you've perverted the system so that you can secure a place. And they saw the tremendous influence Jesus was having with the broader population, and they hated him for it. Caiaphas, the high priest, said, it's better that one man die, then the Romans should come and take away our place. We've got to shut this man up. But we have to do it in a way that is not so visible to the people. I'm going to come back to that, but on this notion that the Jews rejected Jesus, I think we hear that, and we think it was a universal cry, or we look at it from the historical scope, and we say, well, for 2,000 years the Jewish people have been reluctant to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah.

I'm going to come back and talk about that in a good bit more detail in just a moment, because there's some reasons for that, and you and I have had a hand in that. So before we completely sign off on that notion of the Jews' rejections of Jesus, I just want to, I want you to reflect on the biblical narrative. If nobody had been interested in Jesus' message, if the general public had not wanted to hear what Jesus said, if they hadn't followed him, if they hadn't believed in him, if they hadn't had a triumphal welcome for him when he came to Jerusalem just prior to his execution, they wouldn't have bothered with. him. In fact, it's the argument the Sanhedron was the religious, the political, Jewish political body that orchestrated Jesus to be handed over to the Romans. And Peter and James and John, the apostles, pretty soon after Jesus' ascension, get pulled in before that same body of people. And they say, don't you ever mention that name in this city again, because they're having this tremendous influence with the people. And one of the leaders in the Sanhedron stands up and says,

we should be careful. This might be God. And he gives them some, it's in your book of Acts, you can check me. He said that he gives them some historical citations, and he reminds him of some people who claimed to be significant. And they would pull a few followers after them, but then their movements would completely evaporate. And he said, we should be careful with these men who are disciples of Jesus, because we could find ourselves fighting against God. and it's a relatively small circle of people who were threatened by Jesus ministry and the enormous support he got from the crowds and that's the same problem the disciples face after Jesus ascends back to heaven in fact the city of jerusalem is stirred far more powerfully in a more and more broadly through the disciples ministry than it ever was when jesus was in the city himself all the surrounding villages get involved.

In fact, Jerusalem is completely occupied with the narrative about Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah. And the persecution begins to break out against the believers, the Jewish believers in Jerusalem. Stephen is murdered in the street. James is going to be beheaded. And all of it is driven by the jealousy of the power brokers that orchestrated Jesus' crucifixion. Did the Jewish people have a hand in Jesus' crucifixion without any question? Did the broad part of the population of Israel reject Jesus' Messiah? The scripture would suggest the answer to that is absolutely not.

So before you accept the notion as a premise for whatever you would say next about the Jewish people is that they rejected Jesus as Messiah, therefore they, and you can fill in those blanks, at least paused to know that the majority of them did not. Enormous crowds of people followed Jesus. You know, you don't have to look far to see that our economy is in real turmoil. Our nation is $37 trillion in debt. Inflation rates made it hard to buy and sell a house. Even a car, we're all feeling it.

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Go ahead and text them today. There's a corollary. There's a line that comes right behind the Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah. Therefore, God rejected the Jews. kind of a fundamental idea that has a great deal of traction in contemporary Christendom. No matter which Christian tradition you belong to, if you're Baptist or Church of Christ or Presbyterian or Methodist or Roman Catholic, we all like to believe we belong to the right group. And that typically requires us to have reasons that we think others are less than.

They don't take communion in the right way. They don't have the right attitude about women. They don't present alter calls in the right way. They have faulty theology. They're dispensationalist or they're reformed theologians. And we adopt these belief systems that cause us to feel superior. And so we need something to do with the Jewish people because the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, is such a prominent part of our narrative. And so the line that has been latched onto traditionally and historically by Christians is, well, the

Jews rejected Jesus and God rejected the Jews. And I didn't bring you an exhaustive list of Scripture. It would take far more time than a podcast provides for us. But I brought you a couple of verses. The question is ask and answered very clearly in the New Testament. Some of you don't like the Old Testament as much, which is nonsense. The New Testament makes no sense apart from the Old Testament. People say to me, I'm a New Testament Christian.

There's no such thing. That's just an irrational. It's not a new heresy. It's a very old one. So if that's your position, you're in company of many people across a broad period of time, but it doesn't make the idea any more orthodox. We need both the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. But in Romans chapter 11, verses 1 and 2, Paul is writing, a Pharisee by training,

who's had a personal encounter with Jesus of Nazareth and believes he is the Messiah. He said, I ask then, did God reject his people? It's a very important question. very directly ask, and Paul's answer, in English, I'm reading the NIV, he says, by no means. In Greek, it's more emphatic. That's as if Paul is shouting, God forbid. Absolutely not. He said, I'm an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham from the tribe of Benjamin. God did not reject his people whom he foreknew. Don't you know what the scripture says in the passage about Elijah?

how he appealed to God against Israel. And he goes on to use some historical precedent when there were periods in Israelite history where the people were way in the weeds, when the majority of the people were ungodly in percentages far greater than the time when Jesus was walking the hills of Galilee. But Paul said twice in those two verses,

God did not reject his people. Same chapter, Romans 11, verse 11, again I asked, did they stumble so as to fall beyond recovery. Not at all. Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. Gentile is the New Testament word for everybody that's not Jewish. Who are the Gentiles? If you're not Jewish, you're Gentile. The New Testament thinks of people in two big buckets, the Jewish people and the Gentile people. And it said that they didn't stumble so far as to

fall beyond recovery. So God's not finished with them. They didn't forfeit something. There were some things forfeited. We'll talk about that in some more detail. And then in Romans chapter 9 and verse 4, Paul said, the people of Israel, theirs is the adoption as sons, theirs is the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship, and the promises. There's are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ, who is God overall forever praised, amen. Without the Jewish people, we have no story. We would have no access to the family of God. We wouldn't understand the glory of God.

There'd be no covenants available to us. The law of God that teaches us about holiness and purity, it's not a means of righteousness. The New Testament says Jesus was the end of the law as a means of righteousness. It doesn't say he was the end of the law. The heart of the Mosaic law is the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. Do you think that because Jesus came, Thou shalt not murder is no longer a part of God's talking points?

Thou shalt not commit adultery? Do you think that's no longer a talking point? God's not like up for adultery now that we've gotten to the new covenant. It's that Jesus established for us that our status before God isn't derived from keeping a set of rules, which is really good news since none of us can keep all the rules. And if we offend on one point, we're guilty of all of them. So we have a tremendous debt to the Jewish people. God has not rejected them. That question is asked and answered so plainly, so succinctly in Scripture, so that if you hear someone saying that the Jews rejected their Messiah and God rejected them, you understand that both sides of that premise are not derived from Scripture. I'm not really interested in a lot of theological debate or argument,

and I would encourage you, you don't have to have an argument. Just understand that. that the person's saying that either doesn't know scripture or doesn't care about it. Because both of those statements deviate widely from the clear presentation of the New Testament. Now, I want to add to that a component that is an important part of this discussion, and it's one that is, for the most part, I don't think the Christian community is aware of it. I wasn't aware of it until I had some Jewish friends. And that is the degree to which the Christian community, the Christian church, the organized Christian church, across many centuries for as much as 1,500 years or more, have been the primary instigators of the hatred of the Jewish people and barbaric treatment of them.

Murder, rape, the most heinous things perpetrated upon the Jewish people. Jewish people with the blessing and instigation of the Christian community. If that sounds harsh, if you're not familiar with it, I understand that. But I'm going to take just a minute and give you a bit of history. And I didn't glean this from some crazy right-wing evangelical. Some of these things I'm going to source to you, I just took them from Wikipedia, which I know is not the most academically robust site, but it's certainly not the most conservative either. and all of these things I'll share can be easily validated from historical records.

But I think the hatred of the Jewish people, to be completely candid about it, predates Jesus. The largest Jewish community outside of Israel in the Roman world was in Alexandria, Egypt. And as early as the first years of the first century, there are multiple historians. Roman historians that talk about the hatred of the Jewish people that emanated from Alexandria, the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria describes an attack on the Jews there in the was a 38 AD CE, however you're going to use history. Roman Emperor Tiberius, multiple Roman historians say he expelled the Jews from Rome in 19 AD. There was hatred of the Jewish people baked into the Roman.

empire, long before we can talk about a Christian empire or any real flourishing influence of Christianity over culture. Christianity began as a sect within Judaism. There were Pharisees and Sadducees and scribes and ascines. There's these various groups that you've probably heard about in Sunday school or done Bible studies with or maybe from reading the New Testament and included amongst them in those early years after Jesus' crucifixion were Jews who believed Jesus was the Messiah. And that group was flourishing. You may remember from reading Matthew 24 and Luke 21, Jesus said, when you see Jerusalem

surrounded by armies, flee to the hills. Well, in 70 AD, the Roman legions marched on Jerusalem and encircled the city. And Caesar died, and the general that had put the siege in place, went to Rome to put his hat into the ring to be Caesar. And the siege was broken. And when the siege was lifted, the Jesus followers in Jerusalem fled to the hills. And it's really the first time there's a significant break in the Jewish community between that group of the Jews who believed that Jesus was Messiah, because they felt like they abandoned them in the face of the attack of Rome. And in reality, what they were doing was following the instructions Jesus had given them. The siege of the

was re-implemented. The general that withdrew became Caesar. He had, his son puts the siege back in place, and Jerusalem and the temple are going to be destroyed later as a result of that siege. But the hatred of the Jewish people precedes the rise of Christianity. But once Christianity becomes the primary influence in the Roman Empire, Fourth century, Constantine, Many of you know, the Roman emperor that declared the empire, a Christian empire. Tradition says he saw a vision in the clouds before the defining battle of his life. And it was a revelation of Jesus, and so he declares Christianity, regardless of whether that tradition is true or not, Constantine is credited with initiating Christianity as the religion of the empire.

Not just one of the religions of the empire, not another religion in the empire, not another religion in the pantheon of Rome, but the religion of Rome. So now we can talk about Christian influence in the Roman world and as it will spill forward into the unfolding story of history. And without any question, the Christians have been the most persistent, the most hateful, the most unrelenting, haters of the Jewish people. And the key accusation of that is Jewish deicide. Fancy way of saying, that the Jews were collectively responsible for the killing of Jesus. And we need to think about that in a bit more of an informed way. Do you remember how Jesus was killed?

He was tortured to death. Do you remember how he was killed? Not a trick question. He was crucified. Well, you should know that the Jews did not crucify people. They just didn't. It wasn't a form of Jewish punishment. Do you remember how the Jews, if they were going to enact capital punishment?

Do you remember how that was. frequently done even in the New Testament. They stoned people, or they might throw them off a cliff, and if the fall from the cliff didn't kill them, then they would drop stones on them. Stephen was stoned in Acts chapter 7, just outside the walls of Jerusalem. He agitated a crowd. When Jesus went to his hometown in Nazareth, and he read from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue, they were so angered by his comments that they took him to the edge of a hill intending to throw him off. Jesus didn't die by stoning. He wasn't thrown off a cliff and then had rocks thrown on him. He was crucified. It was the, I hate to say popular, it was the most prevalent way of capital punishment practiced by the Romans.

It wouldn't have been uncommon if a Roman Legion came to a new town, a new place where they were trying to exert Roman authority. They would crucify the first ten men they met, not for cause as a means of, flexing as a means of establishing Roman authority in that community. So when we talk about Jesus crucified, the first thing you should understand is the Jews didn't kill him. I know you've got to recalibrate for a minute. And for full disclosure, the Jewish political leaders were engaged in orchestrating his crucifixion. But if we're going to be technical about it, and when I hear people having this discussion and quoting verses, they want to get very technical. It wasn't a Jew that nailed Jesus to the cross. It was a Roman centurion. It wasn't the Jews that stirred guard over Jesus

waiting for him to die. It was the Romans. It was the Roman governor that signed the order that condemned him to death. It was Roman soldiers that put the lash to Jesus back. It was Roman soldiers that fashioned the crown of thorns and pushed it down on Jesus' head. It was Roman soldiers that blindfolded him and mocked him and hit him over the head time and time again and said, if you are really who they say you are, tell us who hits you. All of that was Romans, not the Jews. For the Jews to have defended Jesus, tried to rescue Jesus at that point, would have brought the wrath of Rome on them. In fact, I learned, I studied it in a diverse set of theological places. One of them was Vanderbilt Divinity School. I was in the Graduate Department of Religion

for absolute clarity, same classes, just a labeling issue. But I learned there, and this was 30 years ago, very, very liberal institution at the time. I don't know about today, so I'm not casting any aspersions, but at the time, a very liberal institution. And when they explained the New Testament to us, they were not trying to defend evangelicalism or they didn't respect it. And they weren't concerned about anti-Semitism. So they took the New Testament record, and they said it's abundantly clear that the text was manipulated so that the Jewish people would not be hated further by the Romans. So that when Pilots is on the beam of the judgment seat in Jerusalem, and he has Jesus and

Barabbas, and he says to the crowd of people that have been gathered there by the religious leaders who are being strongly encouraged to go along with the narrative, gee, we have don't have any current experience with public protest of agitators in public that don't necessarily represent the broad majority of the American people. Well, if you borrow those scenes from Minneapolis and you think about the streets of Jerusalem and Pilate has Barabbas and Jesus, and he says, Who do you want me to release to you? And the crowd says Jesus. And Pilate said, well, what do you want me to do with this man? And the crowd shouts crucify him. Well, I was taught in seminary. Don't agree with it, so you understand that the reason that the authors of the Gospels had the Jewish people saying, crucify him, and Pilate said, well, let this blood be on your heads.

And he washes his hands in a basin. The authors are doing everything in their power to say to their Roman overlords who still have enormous political power. We understand you didn't want to do it. but the reality of the circumstance is the Jews didn't crucify anybody. And the Romans were very familiar with ignoring Jewish requests. In fact, some of the wars that preceded that first century when we meet Jesus came because a non-Jewish ruler sacrificed a pig in the temple. Of Jerusalem, nothing could be imagined as more offensive to the Jewish people. Hatred for the Jewish people existed long before the Christians got. to it, but the Christians are going to elevate it to an art form because we accuse the Jewish people

of deicide. In reality, the Romans killed Jesus. No other way to understand it. If the Jews had killed him, they would have stoned him to death. There were communities amongst the Jewish population that would have stoned him to death, but it wasn't the majority of the people. It was 1963. This is not ancient history. 1963, almost 2,000 years after Jesus' death. before the Catholic Church officially withdrew their charge of deicide against the Jews. That means for almost 2,000 years, any knucklehead that had any influence of Christianity and saw a Jewish person, the primary thing they thought is you killed my Lord. That explains a great deal of the hatred and the murder and the venom that has been expressed towards the Jewish people.

and I'm of the opinion, you could disagree with me, that all of that is driven by a spirit, and it's not a Holy Spirit. So it doesn't surprise me at the beginning of the 21st century that we see renewed momentum in this hatred of the Jewish people. It has existed for thousands of years, and it has been very well initiated amongst the people of the Christian faith. You know, after Pilate washes his hands and declares himself innocent of Jesus' blood, the Jewish crowd answers, his blood be on us. It's Matthew 27, if you want to check their references. In an essay regarding anti-Semitism, there's a biblical scholar, and she's not an overly conservative scholar.

She argues that this passage has caused more Jewish suffering throughout history than any other passage in the New Testament. Because in our ignorance, we latch on to the idea that the Jews killed him. They didn't. they may have been some of them may have been in agreement with it but large crowds enormous crowds of people were advocates for jesus the accusation that the jews were christ killers has fed anti-christian anti-semitism and spurred on acts of violence against the jews such as pogroms the massacres of jews during the crusades the expulsions of jews did you know the jews have been expelled from country after country after country Christian countries.

They were expelled from England, France, Spain, Portugal. They were typically subjected to torture before they were expelled. Their property was confiscated. You know, it's very popular today to accuse the Jewish people of mistreating Hamas or the Palestinians. And we are completely ignorant of our historical record of confiscating Jewish property and expelling them from country after country after country. country over hundreds of years. And then we say, well, why don't the Jews like Christians? We're offended. They don't want to hear us talk about Jesus. Gee, I wonder why. How would you feel

if your family story was filled with murder and hate and rape and property confiscation by some of a group of people? And they were saying to you, we have a better view of faith than you have. It's not surprising to me. The average Israeli on the street today is far more comfortable with a Muslim than a Christian. Because the Muslims have not had near the impact on the well-being of the Jewish people that the Christians have over a much longer period of time. Muhammad's not born to the 6th century AD. He's a latecomer to the narrative. Christianity is the official religion of the Roman Empire before Muhammad.

is ever born. So the Christians are inflicting far more pain and suffering on the Jewish people. It starts in the early Roman period. It goes through the late Roman period. There were restrictions upon Jewish occupations imposed by Christian authorities, church leaders. Please understand, restrictions on the jobs that Jewish people were allowed to have by Christian leadership.

Local rulers and church officials closed many professions to the Jews. They pushed them into marginal roles, which were considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and money lending. You see, by religious rules, by Christian religious rules, Christians couldn't engage in those behavior. The Catholic Church in particular had a doctrine that taught that the view of lending money for interest was a sin, but people needed to borrow money. So they took the lowest people amongst them, the people that were the most hate. and they gave them permission to lend money. And then when they collected the interest and the people were mad at the Jews because they were keeping the bargain that had been struck, the church turned the angry people back on the lenders and gave them permission to cancel their interest by canceling the lender.

It's a vicious circle. It was frequent. The number of Jews permitted to reside in different places was limited. So their population, they weren't allowed to be. be in large groups. They were forced into ghettos. They weren't allowed to own land throughout Christian Europe. Some of you read Shakespeare, English literature, a cherished part. And I'm okay with Shakespeare, but in The Merchant of Venice, he has a character Shylock, a Jewish moneylender who reflects the attitude of Elizabeth in England, a greedy, hateful, miserly Jewish person.

And that narrative is promulgated by the Christian Church. They couldn't own property. They were subjected to discriminatory taxes when they entered cities or when they traveled to districts beyond their own home. They were forced to swear special Jewish oaths. I mean, the list goes on and on. Some formal papal restrictions and persecution of the Jews. And some of you say, well, I'm not Catholic. You will be understanding if the Jewish people have trouble making that distinction.

How much distinction do you make between different sects within modern-day Judaism? Probably not a great deal. And the Jewish community in the world is not overly interested in the distinctions between the different groups within Christendom. It's a lengthy list. The testimony of Jews was devalued if there was a court case. or a public dispute as a matter of church law. The Pope declared the testimony of Christians should always be accepted over the testimony of Jews, that those who believe the testimony of Jews should be anathematized.

If you believe a Jew over a Christian, you should be pushed out of public society. There were prohibitions on Jews holding public office. Again, the Pope's signed off on this, so it gets baked into the mindset of Christians. The Jewish people were frequently forced to wear distinctive clothing and badges. This is long before Nazis and yellow stars. The reason the Nazis could do what they did is this was a common pattern that was already baked into social systems and mindsets long before, hundreds of years before the Nazis ever stepped onto the scene with a final solution for the Jewish people.

The Jewish people were frequently condemned publicly and the Talmuds were, their scriptures, were burned. The Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, those are a couple of the more heinous, 15th century, 1400s, if you're not really a history person. The official position of the Spanish government, supported by the Spanish church, was that Jewish people should be forced to convert to Christianity. And they unleashed mass violence on Jewish communities. They confiscated their property.

They would torture the Jewish people. And under torture, it's, If they confessed Christianity, they were just expelled from the country. The Jewish community in Spain, their property, their art, their wealth was all confiscated. Many were forced out. Thousands were murdered. Many were tortured. And then Portugal watched that.

And now, that's such a good idea. We'll do the same. So the Iberian Peninsula, in the 1500s, the Pope issued a papal bull which forced the Jews to live in ghetto. it condemned, it declared absurd, and I quote, that Jews condemned by God to slavery for their faults had invaded the papal state. Again, hundreds and hundreds of years, Jews from Russia across Europe, wherever they went in the world, were subject by Christians to this horrific behavior. Forced conversions or expulsions were popular, frequent, and repeated in century after century, restrictions on Jewish economic activities. I've suggested a few, but they limited

their professions. They limited their ability to own property. One of the remarkable ironies of modern day Israel is that the Jewish people who weren't allowed to own land, so they were separate from the land. They were not agricultural people because they couldn't be. In a time when Europe was an agricultural economy, The Jews couldn't own land. It was a punitive. We've had periods in American history where there were certain peoples amongst us who weren't allowed to own land. Well, when the modern state of Israel, when the Jewish people began to migrate back to the land of Israel, they began to farm.

The first land they got was the most unwanted land, the swamps and the places that the people that were selling them the land they thought was not usable. And the Jews would drain the swamps and begin to learn. They had to learn. they learned from their Arab neighbors. They weren't fighting one another. Their Arab neighbors began to teach them agriculture. Well, today, the finest fruits and vegetables in the markets of Europe are grown in Israeli soil. The Israelis are the world leaders in irrigation and drip irrigation, in water desalination.

They set the world record year after year in milk production, in all of these things. In a desert country, the people who weren't allowed. to own land have made the desert bloom as the prophets said they would. I'll come back. We'll do another session on the fulfillment of prophecies and why perhaps we should pay attention to that. But at this point, can we begin to recognize long before we get to Germany and the Nazis in World War II, there are hundreds of years of hatred of the Jewish people sustained and upheld by Christians. in Russia, the pogromes, the blood libels.

It was not uncommon for an Orthodox priest to walk through a Jewish village leading the groups of people who were murdering and raping and destroying property. If there was a drought, if there was a plague, it was easy to blame the Jewish people. And imagine that we could earn the favor of God by killing, we would go kill the Christ killers. It's that notion of deicide again. Well, then we get to World War II. That's the part of modern history we're probably the most familiar with. And we know that the Nazis killed some six million Jews in their death camps.

I attended a Christian university or Robert's University. I earned a degree in history there. And I had a history professor who he was German, but he said there was no Holocaust. He said the Germans didn't kill six million Jews. This isn't just ancient history, folks. and it resides amongst our Christian communities today. That's why the discussions that are being had, they're not new. This is a very old set of discussions, and it takes a pretty significant ignorance of Scripture.

I mean, they'll pull you into proof text or two or three verses of Scripture and say, see, and then they begin to manipulate historical records, and they don't talk about the behavior of Christians. But we get to World War II and the German solution for the Jewish people, But the Germans didn't just kill the Jews that were in Germany. They rounded up the Christians from all over Europe. They rounded up the Jews from Italy and France and the Netherlands and Poland and all over Europe. And you know why they were able to do that? Because the Christian communities gave them up.

Because for hundreds of years they'd been taught the Jews were not human. They'd been dehumanized. How did the Nazis get away with yellow stars? How did they get away with closing Jewish businesses? How did they get away with Kristallnacht when they destroyed the synagogues across Germany and the law enforcement wouldn't come help against the angry mobs? They were mostly peaceful protest, never mind the burning synagogues. How did they get away with the confiscation of all the Jewish property and the Jewish artwork?

How did the Nazi criminals escape Germany after the Germans fell because the Christian church helped funnel them out of Europe? But the background for all of that was century upon century of hatred of the Jewish people that was put in place by the Christian community. And then the Christians turn around and look at the Jewish people and go, well, we don't understand why you won't accept our faith. I understand why they don't accept our faith. You know, I'm delighted to tell you about one of our sponsors. To be completely honest, we've declined a number of people who wanted to sponsor our podcast or something we were doing. But ancient nutrition isn't just a sponsor.

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there's been a shift in academic training. We've all been taught, whether you know it or not, to use inclusive language. We use inclusive language with regard to our gender. We no longer have postmen who deliver our mail, or male men who deliver our mail or firemen who put out fires. We have firefighters and postal workers because we want our language to be gender inclusive. And we've learned to use inclusive language about a whole host of aspects of our lives. I'm not saying it's evil or wrong.

It is certainly a, requires a violation of some principles of the English language that have been in place for a long, long time. Because many of the words that we found offensive are, in fact, correct English. When we say mankind, it was never intended to reflect just male, the males of the species. It was understood that it represented male and female. But in the pursuit of inclusive language, it was deemed inappropriate. So we've taught students for several decades now. to talk about humankind. I'm okay with that in principle. But when it comes to discussions around our faith, we don't use inclusive language. We use some pretty offensive language. We talk about

an Old Testament and a New Testament. Well, if the old was effective, you don't need a new. And it's not a helpful distinction. The New Testament makes no sense apart from the Old Testament. It is in reality the Hebrew Bible because the Jewish people haven't embraced the message of the New Testament fully. So I understand something has to be labeled, but if you are Jewish and you meet people who have borrowed a significant portion of your faith and they refer to the portion you embrace as old, it's pretty clear you're not affirming of their belief. or we, I read a paper not long ago where the person was talking about the Jewish people in the world today in the Christian church, and they referred to the Christian church as Israel 2.0. Well, if you have 2.0, 1.0 is no longer essential. We have something that's new and improved and embedded. Again, not very inclusive language. You know, for centuries, the Christian community has talked about replacement theology that wherever you read Israel, in the Bible, you can just pencil in church or Christian.

Well, it's fashionable these days not to talk about replacement theology. We talk about fulfillment theology. That since the Jewish people failed so miserably and they rejected the Messiah, God had to fulfill his purposes in another way. Well, that really is not accurate biblically, but that's a little beyond the scope. What I want you to recognize is that the language we've used in the Christian church, the Jews are portrayed as spiritual failures. They were too stubborn or too rebellious to convert to Christianity.

And Christianity is something new and improved. Well, I want to ask you to process that with me just a little more fully. As I understand it, our objective for any person in the world would be to recognize Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah. And my prayer for the Jewish people today is that the people, They would recognize Jesus as Messiah. I'm not asking them to convert to something. I'm asking them to recognize what the Hebrew Bible tells them about. Christians, Christians worship Jesus of Nazareth,

who, oh, by the way, was an observant Jewish rabbi. He's our Lord and Savior. Jesus said, Abraham saw my day. If you want to check me, it's John 8.56. Jesus speaking to the leaders in Jerusalem, he said, your father Abraham, rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day. He saw it and was glad. By revelation, Abraham understood Jesus as the fulfillment of Messiah. King David, clearly from the Psalms, understood the arrival of Messiah and the suffering that would come with that role.

Isaiah understood the role and nature of Messiah. Isaiah 53 is a messianic prophecy. In all the prophetic statements that Isaiah made, Isaiah 53 is a prophecy of a suffering Messiah. It talks about Jesus being despised and rejected by men, that he'll bear the lash. I mean, it's a very poetic description of the suffering of Jesus. In fact, it's an interesting note.

you know, the scriptures were hand copied for hundreds and hundreds of years until we got to the printing press. So the oldest copy we had of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, was copied by a sect of Jewish scribes who dedicated their whole lives to copying the scriptures. So the oldest Hebrew Bible we had was from about a thousand AD, a thousand. after Jesus' death. So Christianity becomes the religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, the 300th.

So Christianity's been a powerful political influence from Rome right on the way. By the time we get to this oldest copy that we have of the Hebrew Bible. And Isaiah 53 is in there. Well, Christian literature and Jewish literature was filled with the fact that the text

had been corrupted by Christian influence. That the Jewish. Jewish people didn't believe their Messiah would suffer. And the liberal Christian scholars, which was very prominent, libraries filled with books that says you can't trust the reliability of Scripture because it's clearly been corrupted as it's been hand-copied. And various theological influences have changed what the scripture says. And really at the heart of much of that debate was Isaiah 53, because it's this messianic prophecy from Isaiah hundreds of years before Jesus was

born. Well, I suspect you've heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were found in the caves around the Dead Sea. In multiple caves, they found scrolls and pieces of scrolls. But at least the tradition is that a shepherd boy looking for a lost sheep, threw a rock into a cave, he heard a jar break, and he found a scroll, which got sold to a shoemaker in Bethlehem, long story. But one of the Dead Sea Scrolls found intact a copy of the Book of Isaiah. And it was a thousand years older than the oldest copy.

we had. So it's going to predate Christian influence. So it couldn't have been corrupted by Christians. And almost letter for letter, it's an exact, it precedes the copy that we had. So Isaiah 53 is a prophecy from Isaiah hundreds of years before Jesus was born that the Messiah would suffer. Isaiah saw Jesus. It's phenomenal to me. None of these individuals, not Abraham, not King David, not Isaiah, not Matthew or Mark or the Apostle Paul would understand our language about converting to something new. Because a Jewish person to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah is not a conversion. They're accepting their Messiah and the sacrifice he made for them, which is a clear part of their scripture. In fact, if you'll read the book of Acts, Paul goes into the synagogue and shows them

from the scripture, and that's not the New Testament, how Jesus was the Messiah. So it's been the pride and the arrogance of the Christian community that is looked upon the Jewish people with disdain and hatred and criticism and arrogance and said, unless you reject something and convert to our superior way, which, oh, by the way, has been expressed to you in murder and hatred and violence and limited opportunity. You have suffered because of that. Then in our arrogance, we think, well, the Jewish people are very reluctant to embrace our faith. And I would submit to you that we're going to have to answer for the way we've treated the Jewish people.

It's a very uncomfortable part of our history. I sat in classes at Hebrew University. And at the time, I didn't know a good bit of what I've shared with you. And most of the Jewish students there were on the junior year abroad from Jewish universities. Remarkable scholars. But they'd never known a pastor. I mean, I was like a museum piece. and they would turn and look at me and go,

why have you hated us so much? There were some very difficult conversations as we worked through that. Our prayer for the Jewish people is they would recognize Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah. I'll leave the labeling of that to God. It's an important point.

I'm going to add to that a couple more things. I've got to wrap this up. I'm overtime. If you're on the treadmill, hang on there. I'll get you done, okay? In John 422, Jesus said something that is very important for us to know. Jesus said salvation is from the Jews. I want you to hear that.

Jesus said salvation is from the Jews, not in spite of. He's not, there's not issuing some scathing condemnation. In Romans 116, Paul wrote, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. It's the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes. first for the Jew and then for the Gentile. So salvation in the name of Jesus began in the Jewish community. Thousands and thousands and thousands of Jewish people in Jerusalem in the expanding areas accepted Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah while they continued forward with their lives as Jewish people.

After thousands and tens of thousands of Jewish people that accepted Jesus as Messiah, non-Jews, began to be involved. Another thing I've heard frequently lately, people have asked me about over and over again, is the modern state of Israel. And they said, the modern state of Israel does things that are ungodly, and I can't support it. I don't believe God would bless that. They have wicked policies and ungodly policies, and we get all puffed up. And I agree, the modern state of Israel does some knuckle-headed things, some ungodly things,

some immoral things. I would never suggest that everything that the modern state of Israel does is godly or right. righteous or upright or just. True that. However, I would remind all of us that political systems don't fully represent the people. You can believe God is involved with the people, that God cares about a people, that God's moving in a midst of a people, even though government action and policies are clearly bad, wrong, or even evil. And we don't have to go to the Middle East to learn this. I believe our nation has a Christian heritage. I believe it was founded by people. who had a desire to see the worship of Jesus be a part of what took place on this continent.

Pretty unmistakable history. We've never been a uniquely Christian nation. We've always been because of those Christian foundations and heritage, but we come from nations of the world. We're a nation of immigrants. What bound us together was a worldview derived from Scripture, a biblical worldview, a Judeo-Christian worldview. So in the nation with that biblical worldview, can I remind you that we've practiced

slavery. You say, well, I didn't practice slavery. No, but on our watch, we've murdered 60 million plus babies and called it health care. If God said to Jeremiah, I knew you when you were knit together in your mother's womb, it's going to be an awkward conversation. We meet those 60 million people in eternity whose lives we said we wouldn't defend. We are currently, we have been, the AMA's rule that has made some changes, but for a good season, we have been presiding over the mutilation, the transmutilation of our children, cutting off their genitalia, and the Christian church hasn't had anything to say about it, for the most part. We've been silent while our faith was removed from public education. Well, it's been denigrated in universities and

academic settings. While we were told our Christian faith had no place in the public square, and we've removed our historic celebrations of our holidays from public places. Christian language hasn't been welcome in government documents. Never mind that our founding documents are filled with language or that our legal system was derived from that biblical worldview. We took our faith out of the corporate settings. I mean, the list goes on in our own country. If you were an outsider looking at contemporary American life, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine that if you had a biblical worldview that we deserve the judgment of God. Yet we look at modern day Israel and go, well, It couldn't be a chosen people.

God couldn't bless them. I'm not going to pray for them. Their government does wicked things. Oh. It's not limited. It's almost comical to me. I had the privilege to travel to Italy once. We celebrate Italians.

We like their food. We like their culture. We like their architecture. I mean, we imitate it in so many ways in our own country. Almost every city where we live, we have Italian. I'm okay with that. But most of us all know, even with the help of Hollywood, that the mafia, the organization,

The organized crime has some significant roots. Some of the most celebrated movies in American history were the godfather. We're not angry at the Italian people because organized crimes had some connection to that group of people. If you prefer more contemporary examples, the Mexican cartels have controlled our border for many years until just recently. They have trafficked millions of people, hundreds of thousands of children sold into slavery, sexual slavery, physical slavery, across our border by Mexican cartels. Yet we love the Mexican people. We're not offended by that.

They're our neighbors. I'm not saying that's inappropriate. We recognize that some subset of the people or some policy of the Mexican government has allowed that murderous behavior for them to be smuggling fentanyl into our nation, and 100,000 people a year have been dying of overdoses. Our family's being destroyed because of what Mexican cartels were doing. Chinese people. We love the Chinese people. I want them to know the gospel and know Jesus of

Nazareth is their Messiah. But the Chinese government, they participate in modern day slavery, organ harvesting. They violate the civil rights, the individual rights, and the human rights of their population on an ongoing basis without apology. But we want to buy all the products we can from China, as cheaply as we can get them, and we're mad at anybody that would put a punitive tariff in place against them. I mean, the list can go on and on and on. And yet we lose our balance and we hate the Jewish, the government of Israel, because they're doing this or that. It seems out of step with our attitude towards ourselves or towards the other nations of the world. I'll give you one more piece. I'm going to stop for this session. I'll come back. We'll pick this up some more.

I haven't made you angry yet and you want to listen some more. I think another chat, The challenge the Christians have had. Sometimes we want to make friends with the Jewish people. We don't want to bring up the Jesus point because we find out pretty quickly that our history is so repugnant to them that they don't want to hear about Jesus and they certainly don't want to hear about being converted. And so we come up with some plan that says, well, they don't really have to deal with that. They have their own covenant with God so they don't have to deal with Jesus. Well, that isn't biblical either.

You know, at the end of the day, the scripture is our rule of faith and practice. in John chapter 3 in verse 3 Jesus said in fact it says Jesus declared I tell you the truth if you don't know this little principle of biblical interpretation when Jesus says I tell you the truth buckle up because what's coming next is going to be such a shock

that Jesus precedes it by saying listen I'm telling you the truth he said I tell you the truth no one can see the kingdom of God unless he's born again that's Jesus' message to Nicodemus he's a member of the Jewish ruling counsel. And he said, I don't care about daily sacrifices in the temple. I don't care about your

kosher rules. I don't care about your talit, your prayer shawls and your tassels. No one, Jesus said, will see the kingdom of God unless he's born again. Nicodemus is perplexed. Some of you know the passage. He's, well, how can a man enter his mother's womb again when he's old? He's thinking of it in terms of biology. And Jesus is talking to him about a spiritual birth. Most of you know Romans 10, 9, and It says, if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved. I would remind you that Saul of Tarsus, the Apostle Paul, trained as a rabbi, Jewish rabbi, wrote that. So it was very clear in the midst of the Jewish community, the academic Jewish community, that the acknowledgement of Jesus was necessary for entrance into the kingdom of God and not just DNA. In John 14 in verse 6, Jesus said, I'm the way, the truth in the life, no one comes to the Father

except through me. The Jewish people have to deal with Jesus the same way that every person on planet Earth has to deal with Jesus. Now, Americans, it's not unique to us. It's a part of the human condition. However, you and I experience God, we think, is the normative, the pattern for everybody should experience God. If the choir sang just as I am and we walked the aisle and we knelt at an altar and someone led us in a profession of faith, that's our preferred method for entering the kingdom of God because it's the one that we found that was valuable to us.

But in reality, what the book of Romans tells us in Romans chapter one is that every human being knows there's a God. Because he's revealed to them in creation that every human being knows there's a God. and we will ultimately be evaluated before God based on the revelation that we have. The Jewish people have to deal with Jesus. It's not enough for them to say we had Abraham as our father. That's a New Testament message. It says God could make sons of Abraham out of the rocks. They'll have to deal with Jesus.

But they don't have to deal with Jesus in the way that you want them to deal with Jesus or I want them to deal with Jesus. I've been to the Amazon in South America. I've been to villages where the people who've lived there have no electricity, have no access to electricity. Most of them will never travel more than 30 miles from the place of their birth. And to expect them to be able to articulate the Christian faith in the same way that I can articulate the Christian faith as an English-speaking person that was born in America is absurd. But I fully trust the faithfulness of God and the justice of God to reveal himself to the people in those places in a way that gives. give them an opportunity to reconcile themselves with the living God.

God is able to do that. And they don't have to hear the choir sing and walk the altar and meet me at the altar and recite the prayer that I hand them. Again, my prayer for the Jewish people is that they would recognize Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah. I'm not trying to force them into my system. But they have to deal with Jesus. They can't ignore Jesus. They don't have a separate covenant.

that will give them peace with God. And if you and I, by our bad behavior, by our hatred and our criticism and our judgment of them, make it more difficult for them to get to know the Messiah, I'm of the opinion that we'll have to give an account for that. And I don't want that to be our legacy. This is not a simple conversation. Clearly, it goes beyond a simple statement in Genesis 12. But I do know God is moving in the earth.

And I know that what God is doing in the lives of Jewish people today is something I've never seen in all of my life. And I've been engaged with the Jewish community for a long time. I met a couple at the church not long ago. They waited at the end of every service. I'll wait at the altar to speak to whoever's there. And I'm going to close with this. There's hope. And they waited a while for me.

It was a mother and a father and an adult. son. And they said, we've watched you online for several weeks. And we drove 12 hours because we knew you would help us know how to transition. And I didn't understand it first because I had a long line. There'd been a long group of people. And I ask them a couple of questions. They didn't tell me, but I recognized that they were Jewish.

They were Orthodox. And they said, we're not exactly sure what to do. The son was a brilliant scholar. He knew scripture. I'm sure he knew the Hebrew Bible better than I. And I said, well, I wouldn't describe it as a transition. I said, you need to know Jesus as Messiah. And they began to weep.

And they said, that's exactly what we need. And then they had a lot of questions about how to engage with their community back home and what that would mean. how to go forward. I didn't have all the answers for them, but I was able to have a dialogue with them. And I wasn't trying to convince them that they had to sing the same chorus as I sing.

But I did want them to know who Jesus was and the essential nature of that relationship with him to give them status in the kingdom of God. And I'm seeing that with the frequency that I've never seen before. But at the same time, I'm seeing the hatred of the Jewish people increasing in a rate that I've never seen in my lifetime.

There's kind of a biblical principle to that, the parable of the wheat and the tears, that the wheat ripens before the harvest of the end of the age and the weeds ripen, that both the good and the evil grow, the same climactic conditions that let the people of God flourish, let the ungodly flourish.

And I think we're witnessing that right now, and I want you to make an intentional decision. Don't just go with the flow. Get your Bible out. Look and listen and think if you're not a student of history, read enough history to understand. Don't let somebody manipulate you with a few cherry-picked facts about who's controlled the world with their money. Understand the role of the Jewish people in the unfolding purposes of God through antiquity and until the completion of this age. And if you do that, I believe it holds really good things for us.

God is moving in the earth. Thanks for your patience. I've talked a bit longer than normal. But I pray it is a benefit to you. And to my Jewish friends, you're not alone. The whole world does not hate you. And I thank God for your faithfulness in so many ways. Thanks for joining me today.

Before you go, please like the podcast and leave a comment so more people can hear about this topic too. If you haven't yet, be sure and subscribe to Alan Jackson Ministries YouTube channel and follow the Culture and Christianity podcast. You can do that on Spotify, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcast. Together, let's learn how to lead with our faith. We can change our culture. I'll see you next time.