Antisemitism

RV152-01

Judgment

God's Temple in Heaven

The Holy of Holies

This is why we become uneasy when people talk, when people try to explain how to go to heaven, and they use phrases that suggest that there is something that you should do to be saved: "Do you want to go to heaven? Confess your sins and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." That is wrong. The minute you say, "Confess your sins,' you have interjected a human element that you must do to be saved: "Do you want to go to heaven? Clean up your life and stop sinning, and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." That is wrong. That combination will take you right into hell.

When John sees that holy of holies open, it tells him that the job has been finished. Christ has completed the action. You can add nothing to it. In the very process of trying to get people saved, Satan (that magnificent, clever, intelligent creature) has caused Christians to misdirect people by coming up with something other than what the Bible requires for salvation, which is trust in Jesus Christ to take you into heaven, on the basis of the fact that He has covered your sins, and keep your hands off the system, and off the project. Do not interject one smidgen of your own effort. If you do, you've denied God the ability to give you something as a present. God says, "I'll take you to heaven if you'll take it as a present. If you try to pay Me for it, or partially pay Me for it, you're out."

The open holy of holies is a very significant thing. John understands that the God of absolute righteousness, the God of perfect justice, has now been entirely satisfied relative to human sin.

The Ark of the Covenant

Therefore, the nation of Israel will yet be elevated to supremacy over all the nations on earth in the millennial kingdom of Jesus Christ. You can imagine how popular an idea like that is with the Arab world today. The Arabs would fume and foam at the mouth if you were to tell them, "Enjoy your supremacy now; enjoy your oil power now; and, enjoy living high on the hog now, because the time is going to come when the Jew, your half-brother, whom you hate (you Ishmaelite descendants), is going to be placed in the position of dominance over you. Someday, the Jewish people will rule the world through Jesus Christ from the city of Jerusalem. And it seems that that is something that is not in the too far distant future.

A Woman

The Jewish People

This nation is understandably a people in suffering. They have been guilty of spiritual adultery. The Jews have refused to listen to their prophets from God. As we saw in the previous session, these prophets included Jeremiah, who spoke so explicitly to them; who spoke with tears; and, who warned them of the great sufferings which were to come; of the captivity which was to come; of the dispersion which was to come; and, of the great destruction that was to come upon them, but they wouldn't listen to them. Instead, as we saw, they silenced Jeremiah for exposing their gross sinfulness as practiced by their religious leaders and the people alike.

That's how people do today. If you don't like what the preacher is telling you, explaining the Scriptures for you, then you silence him in some way. If you can't kill him, just don't come back to the church service. We prefer that you do the latter rather than the former, if you want to silence the preacher. But the point is that you silence him. You just close your ears to him. People get very irritated when you point out the fact that you're simply quoting God.

I had a conversation a few days ago with a person, and he was very adamant in a position that he believed. I pointed out what the Bible said about this, and that what I was telling him was simply quoting Scripture. I said, "Now, if it was up to me, I certainly would do it this way, but God apparently has not gotten His act together, you know, and this is the way that He has laid it out, and this is how it is." When you put it that way, they see how ridiculous they are, because the next step is saying, "Well, the Bible is not true. The Bible is not the Word of God." That's a pretty hard statement to try to defend. Most people with any sense at all are very reluctant to dismiss what Scripture has to say.

However, the Jews, with the Torah to guide them, lost all shame in their immoral practices. They went to the point of silencing the prophets that God gave them, for, in those days, they spoke directly to them. Finally, they passed the point of no return with God. Like in Noah's day, God said, "I'm going to give you 120 years for the message to get out, and for humanity to change its mind. Then there's no return."

As in Jeremiah's day, Jeremiah finally was told by God, "Don't even pray for this people. Don't talk to me about them. They have gone beyond the point of no return, and there is no saving them now.

Listening to False Prophets

The Bereans

So, the Jews ignored these warnings, and everything that Jeremiah told them was going to happen came to pass. They have gone into centuries of worldwide dispersion and suffering.

Satan Hates the Jews

Israel Produced Jesus Christ

Israel Produced the Bible

The Dead Sea Scrolls

What was on them? A copy of the Old Testament Scriptures. When they rolled out these parchments, they discovered that they were 1,000 years older than any other Hebrew manuscript in existence up to that time. What do you think everybody asked right away? "You've got a manuscript that goes back 1,000 years from the oldest manuscript that we have today?" You know what they did. The first thing they did was start matching up that 1,000-year earlier manuscript with the ones we have today. Before I even said what I was going to say, the rabbi said, "And they found no changes. They were exactly the same." I said, "Right." These were 1,000-year earlier manuscripts. The Jews had preserved the Scriptures so carefully. They respected the fact that they had the Word of God; it was inerrant; and, when you read it, it spoke for God. They were not respectful in obedience toward it, but they knew that they had a message from God. Satan hates the Jewish people for producing such a record.

The same is true of the New Testament, which was produced basically by Jews, or by someone like Luke, a gentile, closely associated with the Jews.

Israel will Replace Satan as the World Ruler with Christ

Treatment of the Jews by Religious Christianity

Martin Luther

Now that was exactly a biblically on-target, proper attitude on the part of Martin Luther. Unfortunately, it is very hard to become a popular preacher, with a great following and great notoriety, and still not take yourself too seriously; still be able to joke about yourself; and, still not elevate yourself as if you had achieved some kind of a papal superiority. And Martin Luther was sensitive about being rejected. No preacher can afford to be sensitive about being rejected. Because the Jews spurned his ministry, and they spurned his approach, in time, he had a totally different attitude toward them.

He wrote another tract in the year 1543, some years later. Listen to what he says at this point in time. This was a tract that expressed an attitude that are completely improper for a Christian. It is an improper attitude on the part of Martin Luther. We must say that, at this point, the devil made him do it. The devil indeed got to him. Luther in this tract says, "What then shall we Christians do with this damned rejected race of Jews? Since they live among us, and we know about their lying and blasphemy and cursing, we cannot tolerate them if we do not wish to share in their lies, curses, and blasphemy. We must prayerfully and reverentially practice a merciful severity. Let me give you my honest advice:

"First, (we are) to set fire to their synagogues or schools, and to bury, and to cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom.

"Second, I advise that their homes also be razed and destroyed.

"Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them.

"Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb.

"Fifth, I advise that safe conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews, for they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let them stay at home. (We might well ask 'what home?' since they were all presumably burned in point two – this was a comment of the writer.)

"Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them, and put aside for safekeeping.

"Seventh, I recommend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses, and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow."

Obviously, something happened to Martin Luther along the line, in his view of the Jewish people, to come to such horrible conclusions between the years 1523 and 1543. In 20 years, there was a dramatic change.

Hitler

Mein Kampf

In this book, Hitler proceeded to outline what he was going to do in destroying the Jewish people and all of their influence in German society. What he said was so absolutely crazy that nobody took him seriously. It was so outrageous that people said, "This is just some guy blowing off, and nobody would really seriously do that." But he did. He was determined, because he was a demon-possessed man under the control of Satan, to wipe out the Jewish people.

This is the same suffering of the woman that John saw symbolized here in the book of the Revelation. Hitler should have read Zechariah 2:8, which says, "For thus says the Lord of hosts, 'After the glory, He has sent me against the nations which plunder you, for he who touches you touches the apple of His eye." The apple of the eye is the pupil. Everything in the structure of the eye that God has created (the eyelids; the lashes; and, the brows) protect the center of your eye (the pupil of your eye). If that goes, everything goes. And God, in this analogy, says, "The Jewish people are the key. If you can get rid of them, you frustrate my plan. If you get rid of them, Satan wins – you've touched the apple of my eye.

Well, Hitler was crazy if he thought that God, for one moment, was going to permit the key apple of his eye to be destroyed by Satan, let alone Genesis 12:13, which is an explicit statement of divine protection of the Jewish people in retaliation of those who abused them. In the Abrahamic Covenant, God said, "I will bless those who bless you; and, the one who curses you (the Jewish people), I will curse. In you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed," which they were through the Savior.

One has to only walk through one of the major central death camps, as I did this summer at Auschwitz, Poland, to see how absolutely brutal was the work of Nazi Germany toward the Jewish people. It is staggering to the human imagination, as you look at all the remains: the suitcases; the toothbrushes; the piles of shoe polish; and, all the paraphernalia that people brought to go to a new life in the East. You stand there, and you see those smooth, highly technical ovens that the clever Germans built on the dollies so that 24-hours-a-day, they could shove those bodies into the crematorium. They worked night and day very efficiently, and then dumped the ashes in the river to be carried away.

You stand there, and you look at the people around you, and you look at yourself, and you imagine yourself doing that. You imagine yourself taking a Jewish baby and swinging it over your head and smashing his head against the wall. You think of yourself putting people in that oven. You think of yourself doing it, and you cannot conceive of entering into that. But once you're possessed by Satan's point of view, and once he is in charge of your sin nature, there is no limitation upon what you do. You Christians should remember that there is no difference between you and the unsaved when it comes to what your sin nature will do. You can be just as much of a dirty, rotten scoundrel with your sin nature as a believer, as you can as an unbeliever. It depends upon whether you're going to let the devil control it.

Throughout the history of Western civilization, the policy toward the Jews has been threefold: convert them to Christianity; if they won't convert, expel them; and, after you have expelled them, then annihilate them. This is the source of this enormous suffering which is portrayed by this woman that John sees.

Today, the woman Israel is suffering the combined antagonism of the world, led, of all things, by an Arab called Saddam Hussein, and by the president of the United States, George Bush, who now is willing to place the United States on the Arab side against an internal issue of the Israeli nation, and to vote with the Arabs, and to condemn the Jews. Can you imagine the chill that went through the Jewish nation when that happened a few weeks ago? They saw the nation who has been their great protector, the United States, and they saw the leader of the world's nations, including the president of the United States, who has always stood by the Jewish people, and kept our hands off of their internal affairs. Then we said, "We condemn you for your actions in dealing with the open rebellion against your authority."

Is it any wonder that this woman is going to welcome in time Satan's man, the antichrist, as her protector in her desperation to survive? Israel today is again in great suffering, and great uncertainty, and danger because of her relationship to Jesus Christ, whom she despises.

Antisemitism

Satan

When they did this, God immediately pronounce judgment upon Satan. He pronounced the judgment upon Satan and the angels that there was no way back, and no salvation would be provided for them. But instead, God proceeded to create a special place called the lake of fire, in which they would spend eternity in the most excruciating suffering.

In Matthew 25:41, we were told that: "He said to those on his left (speaking here to human beings who will share this destiny), depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels." Hell was never designed for human beings. It was designed only for Satan and his demon angels. It will be filled by those who choose to join Satan in his rebellion against God. So, in time, God created man in His own image as an object of His grace and love. Man exercised, at Satan's instigation, negative volition to the law of God, just as Satan had. Man did this relative to eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

However, God did not leave man irrevocably doomed to the lake of fire as he had done with Satan and the demon angels. God promised that, in time, He would send, through the woman, a Savior to redeem man, and to reconcile mankind to the living God to man. To man, in his sin, God said, "I'm going to set up a system by which I'll bring you back into fellowship with Me." That was declared in Genesis 3:15. God said, "I'll put enmity between you (that is, between Satan) and the woman: between your side (the unbelievers), and your seed (Christ). He shall bruise you on the head (a mortal wound); and, you shall bruise Him on the heel, a wound which will not be mortal to Christ.

With this declaration, the lines of the angelic warfare were clearly drawn between the seed of Satan, the unbelievers, and the seed of the woman through Christ (the believers). So, to this day, this is what we're engaged in. Every one of us goes into our week, and we are surrounded by this conflict – the angelic warfare. It is not only within the circle that you and I move, but in the wider circle of your community; the wider circle of the state you live in; and, the wider circle of the nation you live in, within the whole world. We are all marshaling ourselves in the daily conflict on the basis of following Satan or following God.

Satan himself understood God's plan of redemption very clearly. Therefore, he proceeded to marshal his forces to frustrate it in order to escape the lake of fire. We're talking about where antisemitism began, and why it persists. Satan understood what God had said. The key was the Savior. The key was a line of human beings through which the Savior would be born. If you want to stop the program, and if you want to frustrate the decree of God, get the line of humanity through which He must come? If you can't do that, get the Savior Himself before He is born, or after. If Satan could not destroy the Savior, then God would win the angelic warfare, and carry out His sentence to put Satan and his demons forever into the lake of fire.

Abel

Abraham

This line of Abraham would become the witnesses to the world of God's divine viewpoint concerning salvation. God saved this Shemite, Abraham. He led him to leave his home in Ur of the Chaldees, and move to a Promised Land on a little strip of territory on the Mediterranean Sea. When Abraham was 99 years old, God changed him from a gentile into a Hebrew, and made a special strain of humanity descending from the mass of the human race. This special river of humanity, the Jewish people (the Hebrews) became the focus of Satan's attack, and thus the object of antisemitism.

Genesis 17:24 tells us about that formal transition from gentile to Hebrew. At this point in time, God had performed on Abraham the ritual religious ceremony of circumcision that now identified him as the special earthly people of God. That became the sign of the Jewish people's relationship in the Abrahamic Covenant: "Now Abraham was 99 years old when he was circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin." Satan immediately zeroed in on Abraham to destroy him, and to prevent the birth of Jesus Christ the Savior through his progeny. God pronounced a special protection, therefore, upon the Jewish descendants of Abraham, to preserve them forever as the people of God.

In Genesis 12:3, God has made great promises to the nation. This line of descent from Abraham was immediately under satanic attack. When Moses completed the Torah by writing Deuteronomy, he reminded the Jewish people that they are under the special protection of God (Deuteronomy 32:10). They certainly needed to know that: "He found him in a desert land, and the howling wastes of a wilderness. He encircled him. He cared for him. He guarded him as the pupil of his eye," speaking of Abraham and his descendants.

In the book of Jeremiah, the same principle is stated. Jeremiah 31:35-37 speaks of the eternal protection of the Jewish People: "Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day, and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar. The Lord of Hosts is His name. 'If this fixed order departs from before Me,' declares the Lord (the luminaries out in space; the planets out in space; and, everything that God has put together – the way the systems of nature work; if the sun quits working; the moon quits working; and, the stars don't function), then the offspring of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me forever.'

"Thus says the Lord, 'If the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out below, then I will also cast off all of the offspring of Israel for all that they have done,' declares the Lord."

Well, the point of all this is that the sun is not going to stop. It is not going to cease from its function in the sky. The moon is not going to cease its rotation. And, contrary to what Chicken Little says, the sky is not falling, nor any of the stars with it. They're all going to stay up there, and they're all going to keep running, and they're all going to keep functioning, because God says, "That's my sign to that there is always going to be a Jew."

It was the ambition of Hitler and the Nazis to be able to declare the conquered territories "Jewish free." There was nothing that pleased the more than to be able to report to the Führer: "This county is now Jewish free. This country, that we have conquered, is now Jewish free. There is not a single Jew left – not a single one." They intended, under Satan's direction, to remove every Jew from that portion of the world that was under their domination.

The History of Antisemitism

However, in modern times, it has been just as bad. During the Middle Ages, from the fall of Rome to the discovery of America, the Jews were harshly persecuted. Most of the persecution came from organized religion, which saw them as Christ-killers, and as deserving of punishment. The Jews, throughout the centuries, have been blamed for various social and economic disasters, and murdered by the mobs. When the bubonic plague was raging in Europe, and millions were dying, the Jews were blamed for that. For anything that could be an excuse to kill the Jews, Satan would trigger that.

The Spanish Inquisition

After a while, Torquemada ran out of Christians to torture. And the torture was terrible. It was so intense. The keenest part that he thought up was the rack, where you put a person across a round cylinder, and you tied his feet at one end, and his hands over his head at the other end. Gradually, you cranked both ends with a ratchet. They would periodically ask: "Will you now recant, and subject yourself to Mother Church?" And when you said, "No, I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ," they would roll it up another notch at each end, and you'd feel yourself being pulled tighter and tighter, until there was a sickening loud snap, and your backbone broken in two.

Or they would rip the tongue out, or they would blind the eyes. There was no bestiality to which Torquemada and his Roman Catholic agents did not sink in order to convince you that heaven was through the ministration of Mother Church of Roman Catholicism.

When he ran out of Christians, he decided to go after the Jews. The Jews were very prominent group in Spain. They were middle class, which is where a nation has its strength. They were great men of art, science, and finances. They had contributed mightily to Spain, and they were loyal to the king and the queen. One of the leading rabbis was a man who was extremely wealthy, and who was a close counselor of Ferdinand and Isabella. When he got word that they were about to sign a decree expelling all Jews, upon pain of death, from their kingdom, if they did not convert to Catholicism, he went to the king and queen, and he offered them an enormous sum of money, which at that particular time, because Columbus's expedition was standing by at the dock, they needed. And because they themselves were very reluctant to treat this man who had been their friend and counselor and associate for so many years with such brutality, they gave him an ear, and they came within a fraction of agreeing to accept his gift, and to refuse to sign the order.

Torquemada was standing at the door listening. He took his crucifix, and when he saw what was happening, he rushed in, and held it up before the king and queen and said, "You, like Judas, are about to sell your Lord for your 30 pieces of silver to this Jew, as Judas did to the Jews of Christ's day."

Well, because Ferdinand and Isabella were not people of doctrinal understanding (probably not even saved), this was a superstitious, dramatic entrance, and they were fearful. They just said, "Give me the pen." And at that moment, they signed the decree.

It is interesting at the very month and the very year in which they signed that decree for the destruction of all the Jews in the Spanish kingdom, was the time that Columbus left the dock and sailed for America, and found the new continent, the new land, where the Jews would find, in the future, one of the greatest havens of protection they have ever had, particularly in North America, and the United States.

From the time that this decree was signed by Ferdinand and Isabella, Spain declined in prosperity, and as a world power, because the Jews fled, and with the Jews went their solid middle class citizens. But by 1569, with the work of Torquemada and his Catholic agents, Western Europe was virtually devoid of all Jews.

This is the historical background of what John sees. This woman (Israel), who's been unfaithful to her husband (the living God), and who now is in suffering like a woman giving birth to a child, is suffering because of that unfaithfulness to her husband, God. Now John sees that she is about ready to be delivered of that suffering, because the tribulation is near the end now. The bowls are about ready to be poured out, and the finish is about to be brought into this whole antisemitic history of the Jewish people. They are about to be shown that Jesus, the Christ, was their Savior and their Messiah.

We are told that they suddenly turn to Him. Then the Bible says that: "A nation is born in a day." Suddenly, Israel becomes truly the Israel of God. It is amazing how the Word of God always accurately fulfills itself.

The lesson to us is: "Treat the Jew kindly." Remember, that when you do business with a Jew, he may try to "Jew you down," but when you do business with a gentile, they try to "gentile you up." So, the Jew, as a people, should not be the object of your hatred. The object of your concern, and the attitude that Martin Luther demonstrated early in his ministry, is the attitude that we should take toward these people. They have been blinded with a double-whammy: "His blood be upon us and upon our children." Everybody is born into the human race with the old sin nature that blinds you to the truth of salvation and the truth to Jesus Christ. But God says, "Upon the Jewish people, I have placed a second blindness, so that they cannot see their Messiah." It is terrible to have one whammy on you. But to have a double-whammy of blindness is marching the Jewish people lock-step into Satan's lake of fire. Consider yourself indeed graced out – that God has opened your eyes, and enabled you to see. Now take your keys, and start opening the doors to eternal life to the Jewish people. Don't abuse them. God prospers the people who care for the Jews. He brings judgment and destruction on the nation which opposes and abuses them.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1990

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