The Subversion of American Evangelicals

The subversion of American Evangelicals [Excerpts]

[On March 7, 2016] the Bethlehem Bible College, an Evangelical Christian college in Jesus’ hometown, opened its fourth biennial Christ at the Checkpoint conference. The conference, which is directed specifically toward US Evangelicals, [ran] through the week.

Today, Evangelical communities in the US number anywhere between 60 and 150 million people, depending on who is counting. They form the backbone of American support for the Jewish state. It is the support of the Evangelical community, rather than the Jewish community in the US that ensures that come hell or high water, no matter how Israel is demonized in the media and in academia, the majority of Americans continue to support Israel.

But will this support last?...At least as far as Israel is concerned, the readiness of Evangelicals to support the most anti-Israel candidate running for the Republican presidential nomination is no surprise. To understand why this is the case, the Christ at the Checkpoint conference in Bethlehem is a good place to look. According to its website, the mission of the biennial conference “is to challenge Evangelicals to take responsibility to help resolve the conflicts in Israel/ Palestine by engaging with the teaching of Jesus on the Kingdom of God.”

In recent years, replacement theology has extended its biblical revisionism from Jews as people reviled for their rejection of Jesus and their supersession by Christians to Israel. The Jewish state is reviled as a religiously prohibited entity whose very existence is a sin against God. According to current replacement theology, Jesus was not a Jew. He was a Palestinian. The Jews are not a people. They have no rights to the land of Israel. Israel, it is asserted, has no historical or theological right to exist. Rather, according to the rewritten scriptures, the Palestinians are the chosen people.

The replacement theology at the heart of the conference was made explicit by Rev. Jack Sara, president of the Bethlehem Bible Conference, at the 2012 conference. In his speech Sara edited Chapter 37 of the book of Ezekiel to transform the dry bones prophecy. That prophecy, of course, is one of the most Zionist passages in the Bible. God speaks to Ezekiel and tells him that the people of Israel will be reborn. They will be gathered from the four corners of the earth, return to Israel and restore the Davidic kingdom.

Yet in Sara’s revised version, the people of Israel, the descendants of Jacob, are replaced by the Palestinians. Sara preached, “The hand of the Lord was on me and He brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and sent me in the middle of the West Bank – Bethlehem, Jenin and Salvit and Nablus and Ramallah.

"It was full of bones.... He asked me, ‘Son of Man, can these bones live? Can the Palestinian people live?’ Then He said to me ‘prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.’” Sara then said, “You see, the Palestinian people were and are a lot like this valley of dry bones that is in need of the Church to come and prophesy life on them.”

The promotional video for the conference made clear that the conference had no intention of “spreading justice and peace.” The video interlaced footage of Palestinians walking in heavy traffic and waiting to cross into sovereign Israel with footage from Islamic State (ISIS) videos showing hostages about to be beheaded and burned alive. Israeli flags flapping in the wind were juxtaposed with the ISIS flag. And then, apropos of nothing, the video showed the cellular structure of the H1N1 swine flu virus.

The implied message was clear. Just as Nazi propaganda depicted Jews as viruses, so the Christ at the Checkpoint video depicted Israel as the moral equivalent of ISIS and the medical equivalent of swine flu.

Key figures in this undertaking bring American church leaders and academics to Bethlehem and feed them a diet of anti-Israel propaganda and outright lies masquerading as biblical teaching and objective assessments of reality. These American Christian leaders have taken up the cause of ending support for Israel among Evangelicals upon their return home. Key financiers, like Mart Green, the heir of the Hobby Lobby fortune and the chairman of the board of trustees of Oral Roberts University, and financier George Soros have been instrumental in disseminating these positions to all levels of the Evangelical community in the US.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-The-subversion-of-American-Evangelicals-447165