The Church and Israel
Understanding Yad L’Achim, and Harassment of Christians in Israel
You wont' find it in Zionist talking points, but Israel has always mistreated Christians in the Holy Land. But by all accounts, it's getting worse.
At the center of Israel’s anti-missionary effort sits Yad L’Achim, “The Hand of the Brothers,” a well-funded, well-connected organization whose explicit mission is to stop Jews from converting to Christianity and to suppress Christian evangelism aimed at them. It does not operate in defiance of the Israeli state, but in harmony with its assumptions, laws, and enforcement culture.
By monitoring missionaries, pressuring landlords and municipalities, filing police complaints, mobilizing public outrage - and occasionally planting bombs you don’t read about in American papers - Yad L’Achim activates a legal and social system already predisposed against Christian witness. Evangelicals abroad continue to fund, defend, and advocate for Israel under the belief that loyalty earns goodwill, while a dedicated enforcement arm works openly to ensure Christianity never gains traction on the ground.
“A people in treason against her King cannot lay legitimate claim on the King’s promises to a covenant-keeping people.”
The Bible does not teach that we should be partial to Israel in the present Christ-rejecting rebellion against God, they can not claim a divine right to the land of Israel in spite of their rebellion and unbelief against their Maker and their covenant God.
God's promises were made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as believers and they were the spiritual food and property of none but believers (Rom 4:13,16) (Pink, "The Divine Covenant")
Rom 9:6-8 6 But it is not that the word of God has taken no effect. For they are not all Israel who are of Israel, 7 nor are they all children because they are the seed of Abraham; but, “In Isaac your seed shall be called.” 8 That is, those who are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God; but the children of the promise are counted as the seed.
Defending the Talmud requires pretending it is not what it claims to be, ignoring what Jesus said about rabbinic tradition, and repeating apologetics talkingpoints designed for evangelicals who don’t know the difference. It requires recasting a rival authority as a neutral commentary, flattening a false religion into a pile of harmless opinions, and assuring believers that a book written to oppose Christianity contains spiritual wisdom worth mining.
The Koran denies Christ, but the Talmud actively desecrates Him. One rejects the gospel. The other was written to oppose it. That distinction matters, and ignoring it has consequences the church is already beginning to feel.
When Douglas Wilson recently sat upon the TPUSA stage and defended the Talmud from criticism, the most offensive part was not that he is factually wrong about the Talmud and obviously so. It is that his words were familiar. The cadence, the caveats, the careful minimization, the insistence that critics are being unfair because the thing under scrutiny is allegedly more complicated than they are allowing, all of it reads like a catechism already memorized. It was, verbatim, the defense that Rabbinic Jewish apologists provide when doing interfaith diplomacy with American evangelicals, when they become privy the Jewish holy book’s blasphemous claims about Christ, its repletion of animus toward Christians, and its hostility toward Christian values.
It is also good to discover a perspective, in this case a perspective from the USA, that you had never fully used in order to make critical sense of a series of events, of casual historical assumptions, of the power of myth and self deception and of what I see as a descent into inhumanity: so many clever people, so much intellectual effort and scholarship and so much dedication to a cause that believed it had the right to displace an indigenous people, rob them of their rights, houses, land, liberty and lives.
Against Our Better Judgment
Alison Weir
Who are the People of God?
