Dear church family,

There is an interesting article in today's New York Times. It's interesting to see how determined our government is in propping up corruption in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, China, and Russia - while so hypocritically attacking it in other countries. 

Even more angering to me is the insistence of the evangelical community to back an ungodly Jewish state over the best interests of the Christians in Palestinian churches across the West Bank and Gaza areas.

For an illustration of how devastating the effects of Israel's policies are being toward Palestine you need to follow what is happening to such formerly vibrant and missionary-minded churches as 1st Baptist Church of Gaza (a Palestinian Christian church)!

Virtually everything American evangelicals are doing in their idiotic, headlong, blind support of Israel is inconsistent with Paul's teachings on the establishment of the church and the judgment of non-Christians, Jews or gentile.

The entire 'messianic-Jew' infatuation of evangelicalism is anti-Pauline theology.

The same crowd that kept Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert, et al, propped up are the ones swooning over an ungodly Israel. This unBiblical heroism of modern day Israel is being perpetrated by ignorant preachers (who get some ego stroke over being used by tourism folks) who are infatuated over a small piece of geography that God repeatedly turned over to the worst of humanity whenever those who were called by His name were heathens themselves.

That was pre-Jesus! To lay claim on Old Testament prophecies by misappropriating them and placing them in the post-Jesus-sacrifice days of the Church is as errant as are the Jehovah's Witnesses and all others who have decided that the predominantly 'gentile' Church is an inadequate and inferior representation of the sacrificial blood of Jesus.

I am PRO Church of Jesus Christ! That means I am opposed to any and all who would bring harm to the cause of Christ and the establishment of the church. Of necessity then I am opposed to the efforts of the U.S. in embargoing and persecuting Palestine, as it has brought great grief and disaster to the churches there - since Christianity is identified with the U.S.

I am ADAMANTLY opposed to the philosophy and efforts of Israel to keep Palestinians inferior in status and treatment. The Palestinians are to the Israelis much as blacks were to whites in the pre-60's South.

It is wrong! God help us to get our personal theology from the Bible and not from the scads of books in evangelical bookstores. Evangelical eschatology has become so political in its neo-Jewish-nationalism that it has sunk to new unBiblical lows.

What is so difficult to understand in this passage? Galatians 3:28. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise."

That promise is to those who have let go of, disavowed, any claim to God other than through the sacrifice of Jesus...not of works, not of birth, not of citizenship - but through the blood of Jesus.

That puts Christian Palestinians, Christian Iraqis, Christian Iranians, Christian North Koreans, Christian Mexicans, et al, ahead of the political considerations of our or any other government.

We are called to an eternal kingdom. We are called to a brotherhood, a sisterhood of humanity bound together in Christ Jesus. We are called to action in and through love.

That 'love' superceded the Zionism of 1st Century Judaism and the arrogance of the Roman Empire. That 'love' must supercede the Zionism of our 21st Century and the arrogance of the United States or we have failed the cause of Jesus, the Christ.