Yesterday was a jammed packed Sunday service, so I decided to cut out about ten minutes of my message on “His People/Revised”. It was intended to be a brief overview of the current views of the State of Israel. The discussion comes off of Paul’s question in Romans 11:1 that is concerned with the apparent rejection of Israel by God. Since they are, according to Romans 10:21, ”constantly disobedient and stiff-necked”, has God cast-away his people?

To hear the four views you can watch the sermon on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuu2CwOWBtM.

The Discussion on Demonic Hate

As I communicated in my original sermon, my personal position on which “view” I think is correct, first and foremost is one of caution. We must be very careful not to stand in judgment over a nation that was God’s beloved for thousands of years. Especially since there is a vital part of Israel’s story we seldom take into account when evaluating thier significance. 

To help understand what I am getting at, I want us to go back to the Christmas story. If we were to continue reading the narrative of Jesus’ birth in Matthew 2:13-18, it takes a really dark turn. Herod, in his fury and fear of losing his throne to an upstart Messianic figure,  took out his vengeance on the rest of the Jewish babies: 

“When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

This is know historically as the “The slaughter of the innocents.” Why did such an atrocity take place? What I want to suggest is that when it comes to Israel there has always been darker forces at play. 

I am convinced that Satan and his demonic minions know something about Israel we don’t know, and as a result, there is constantly a historical hatred aimed squarely at the Jewish people.

I want you to turn to a very interesting verse, according to Revelation 12:1-5. Since time immemorial, Satan has wanted to utterly destroy the Jewish people.

“A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”

The dragon, which symbolizes Satan and his world-system, all throughout human history, has wanted to destroy the woman and her child. Most scholars say the woman here is the Nation Israel, and the child is the Messiah who has come to rule the earth. Satan wants him and his people destroyed to stop his rule; this demonic hatred still rages, and I believe it is the driving basis of all  historical “Anti-semitism.” 

A History of Hate

You can track Satan’s malice and dark-influence in real-time history with Israel. Let me quickly give a brief summary of the rage:

• In Moses’ day, you have the Egyptians killing all the Jewish male babies –  a precursor to the slaughter of the innocents that we just read about. (https://www.bible.com/bible/111/EXO.1.15-22.NIV)
• In the Old Testament times of the kings, you have the Assyrian & Babylonian captivity where hundreds of thousands of Jews were marched out of their homeland and placed in bondage and slavery as captives in foreign countries. (https://alqudsjerusalem.com/history/the-exile-and-the-return-the-assyrian-babylonian-and-persian-eras/)
• We already saw during Jesus’ birth, the slaughter of the innocents from birth to 2 year old males. (See above)
• In 70 A.D. you have the siege of Jerusalem and complete destruction of the temple by the Romans, and the death toll of 1.1 million Jews who were then scattered throughout Europe called the diaspora. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(70_CE))
• The Spanish Inquisitions during the dark ages saw tens of thousands of Jews tortured and killed, the invasion of the promised land by the Ottoman Empire treated the Jews with harsh contempt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_of_Jews_from_Spain), and even the Christian Crusades led to massacres and expulsions of Jews from their villages and lands. (https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-crusades/)
• The Pogroms of Jews in Russia saw whole villages throughout Russia and Ukraine systematically wiped-out from 1880-1920. (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/killing-fields-ukraine) At the time a paper known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was released and it was a falsified antisemitic hoax purporting to be the minutes of secret meetings held by Jewish leaders plotting to take over the world. This fraud is still being used to scapegoat Jews for social unrest and to promote the false idea of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. (https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2020/september/whitfield-conversation.html)
• Of course there was the NAZI holocaust that has conservative estimates at 6 million Jews exterminated in death camps across Europe. (https://www.ushmm.org/antisemitism/holocaust-denial-and-distortion/evidence-documentation-holocaust)
• The establishment of the Jewish State in 1948 started a constant war with the surrounding Arab nations that ignited the never ending Arab-Israeli Conflicts, like the 1967 Six Day War where the Egyptians massed an Arab army that wanted to drive Israel into the Mediterranean  Sea, 1982 & 2006 Lebanese Civil War, 2023-Present Hamas hatred, and of course October 7 slaughter. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_conflict) And if you have any respect as a Biblical historian, you cannot ignore the Arab League Summit of 1967 where 15 Arab nations made a 3-Noes resolution that is still binding for many: (1) No Peace with Israel, (2) No Recognition of Israel, (3) No Negotiating with Israel. (https://www.sixdaywar.org/immediate-aftermath/the-3-nos-of-khartoum/)
• Nowadays there is a rising tension worldwide concerning ‘antisemitism’ the ADL put out this statement at the end of 2024.

Name one nation and ethnic group that is hated like this group?

My contention is this: If Satan isn’t done with hating Israel, he must know that God isn’t done with them either? And also, I don’t want to contribute to it. I simply want to let God be God, he can do what he wants, and let every man be a liar.