Now another question: if “Yasha’yah Hanavi” – Isaiah the prophet in chapter 11 said…
The nations will resort to the root of Jesse…
- …the “sores Yisay”..
- …the peoples…
- …the “ammim”.
The rabbis have always said the “Sores Yisay” is the Messiah. Jews and Christians, their scholars have always agreed: “the nations”, “the Gentiles”. “the peoples” will come to the “Root of Jesse”.
I look at an anti-Semitic world. I look at a world where becoming a Christian in Saudi Arabia somebody is beheaded or hung. A world where in Sudan nearly 2-1/2 million Christians have already been killed and more facing the prospect of death. Yet Gentiles of so-called Christian nations remain almost silent, no one calling for a boycott on Saudi Arabia oil or an academic boycott on the many nations that persecute Christians: Islamic countries. But when the one nation in the Middle East that protects the rights of Arab Christians, Israel, the one nation that protects the rights of Arab Christians defends themselves from this same militant Islam that murders Christians, everybody wants to condemn Israel. It's not logical, it’s not rational. Israel is treating most Christians (apart from Jewish ones), apart from Jewish believers in Jesus, they treat most Christians better than Christians treated them, except in the United States and, to a degree, in Britain. Most nations have never given Jews the kind of freedom that Israel gives to Christians. It’s not rational that they hate Israel; it's not rational-behaving people who receive three quarters of the Nobel prizes for the advancement of science, chemistry, physics, and especially biomedical sciences that have saved countless lives. Why would you hate these people? It’s not rational.
All over the world there’s anti-Semitism. Even people saying they’re Christian, there’s anti-Semitism. Although all four Gospels make it clear that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate – the Roman government has legal responsibility for His death – and although Jesus said, “I lay My life down, nobody takes it from Me”, (Jn. 10:18) and although Christians believe that God said He was going to put the Messiah to death as an atonement for sin, although Jesus never blamed anybody for His death, and although the apostles said it was the Roman government together with the Sanhedrin but it was not the Jewish people, although blaming the death of the Jesus on the Jews is directly contrary to history and to the teaching of the New Testament, they’re still saying the Jews killed Jesus. It’s not rational. No, this anti-Semitism is not rational, but there’s something even more irrational.
“We hate you, Jew! You’re a kike! You’re a yid! You’re a sheenie! Get out of here! We hate you! You’re no good! We don’t want you in our land and to go to your own land you have no right there either! You have no right to exist! But we’re going to worship your God.” We hate you but we love your Messiah; we’re going to follow your Messiah; Why will Eskimos worship a Jewish God? Why will Pygmies worship a Jewish God? Why will Scandinavians worship a Jewish God? It makes no sense. If you hate these people, why do you worship their God? Because “the nations will resort to the root of Jesse”.
My question, might dear Jewish friend, is you and I both hate anti-Semitism but you and I are at a loss to explain it or at least intellectually. We can come up with some explanations but the entire history of it coming back to the same thing again and again? It’s not logical. But if you hate somebody, why would you follow one of them? Why would you believe their books and worship their God? There’s only One, One, and One alone who could make people worship the God of a nation and race they otherwise hate.
Now I’m not saying true Christians – born-again Christians, real evangelicals – I’m not saying that they hate the Jewish people. If you look at the countries with a high evangelical population you'll find even in the Holocaust it was countries like Holland and so forth, in Denmark, that protected the Jews. It was mainly the Catholic and nominal Protestant countries that persecuted them.
The American Jewish Congress, the American College of Rabbis, knows very well the backbone of Jewish support for Israel in America is not the Jewish community, there's only 6 million in North America at most. It is the evangelical Christians who are pro-Zionist. Most of them. Not all Christians are anti-Semitic. You see, the same as there are people who will hate you because you are a Jew, claiming to be Christian, there are other Christians who will love you because you are a Jew. They will say, “How can we worship a Jewish God and believe in a Jewish Messiah and read a Jewish book and stake our eternal destiny, our faith on it and hate these people who gave it to us?” They’re not all irrational, but you shouldn’t be irrational either.
Many people calling themselves Christians are behaving irrationally. They’re worshiping a Jewish God and believing in a Jewish Messiah while hating Jews. It’s irrational. But don’t you be an irrational Jew. It’s a rational question that deserves a rational answer. If He is not the Messiah who would make the Gentiles worship your God, who is? Why else do they worship your God if He is not the one who God said would make them do it?
