7. Accurately
Interpreting Today’s Divine Actions Regarding Natural Israel,
Continued
- Pre-Restoration and
the Lord’s “Repentance Imperative”
As a re-formational
positioning of an unbelieving people with whom God is pleading, the
Pre-restoration of Israel must be seen as a work designed to precipitate what’s necessary to
lead Israel to the real surrender that, according to the prophecies,
will then bring forth her
regenerative restoration as part of Eternal Israel. This precipitation to repentance is
the arch objective of the
Pre-restoration.
Paul tells us God
intends to complete His eternal transnational Body through Israel’s
repentance. (“And so all
Israel shall be saved.”) Once Israel’s self-denying repentance is
achieved and the Lord’s transnational Body completed, everything else in
God’s plan for the next age may proceed, including award of the
Abrahamic Land inheritance to a restored, completed Eternal
Israel.
Accordingly, this
“Repentance Imperative” must
eclipse every other interpretation of God’s intent toward modern Israel;
and can be our only standard for rightly measuring His heart and mind
behind the Pre-restoration. In its light, every interpretation of today’s
events that sees God’s intent as to now give the Jews the Promised Land
by right of inheritance collapses.
As a summons to
divine litigation in the divine “Court of Claims,” Israel’s modern
return is literally a “leading to
repentance” quite distinct
from an establishing of inheritance rights. This dynamic, which
casts such a different light on God’s view of things today, calls for a
penetrating discussion.
·
Goodness
and Severity: The “Carrot and Stick” of
Repentance
From the perspective
of Repentance Imperative, both the Jews’ success in returning to Israel
and their present trials
there belong to God’s plan. This is because the way to repentance has
two avenues—as in the “carrot and stick” metaphor.
Like the proverbial
carrot, the goodness of God leads to repentance (Rom. 2:4). His goodness
is seen in the Jews’ stirring to return, their victories and the many
signs of favor upon them. But like the stick, God must also use severity
to prod to repentance (Rom. 11:22; e.g. Rev. 16:9,11). Given the depth
of Jewish blindness, God has a very hard nut to crack. That hardness
requires the severity of opposition the Jews yet face.
Where prospering the Jews in their bid to return has supported the Repentance Imperative, God has so prospered them in it. Where it has not supported His purpose, He has allowed them to remain bedeviled by their enemies and oppressed under Gentile feet—despite their national re-forming on the Land. The Repentance Imperative alone explains why God has both stirred the Jews to return to the Land, yet hasn’t allowed them quiet sovereign title to it or decisively “proven” to the world that the Land is “theirs” and that He is “on their side.” 33
The next two
subsections carefully examine the “carrot and stick” aspects of the
Lord’s Pre-restorational strategy as a means to
repentance.
- The “Carrot:” Longing for a Homeland
Though the Jews
cannot inherit the Land as they are, their insatiable desire for
repatriation is still from the Lord. The premier purpose of this desire
is to lead to repentance. But
why this intense stirring now after so many centuries? And how does it
work to lead the Jewish people to recognize and submit to
Yeshua?
Before God reveals
Himself, He creates a longing for Himself. But between the longing and
the revelation is a period of blind search for something else. The Lord
often veils our longing for Him behind a longing for other things
and relationships. He stirs a longing for lesser things, then uses the
frustration, disappointments and failures we experience over them to
reveal our real need for Him.
So it is for the
Jews and the Land. Their longing for the homeland of “Eretz Yisrael” is actually a
veiled longing for the Lord Himself. It is divinely inspired. Yet it is
a longing in blindness. It is a means to an end.
The Jews don’t
understand their longing for what it is. They see the Land as their
ultimate objective. So they contend for it with all their heart, though
they can never again have it on the terms they once did. They believe if
they can just be established on it, their hopes and aspirations as a
people will be fulfilled. And in His goodness, God has given it back to
them in a small measure under Gentile sponsorship.
But though they have
succeeded at returning, they are not satisfied, only the more
unsatisfied. Each little victory brings no real peace, only deeper
angst—as when one tries to quench his thirst by drinking melted snow,
only to be made the thirstier.
This condition is to continue until the mounting futility associated with the search for establishment leads the Jews to the repentant realization that their real need is for One their fathers rejected—that they belong to Him, and that they must surrender their longing for the Land to receive Him alone before they can have “it” in the truly restorational way prophesied of old. (“He that loses his [desire for the Land] for My sake will find it.”)34
This is how God’s
goodness—by producing a state of “unfulfilling fulfillment” in the hope
of establishment—is leading Israel toward repentance.
-
The “Stick:” Reckoning with the Mosaic Curse
Though stirred and
prospered to return to the Land, the Jews nevertheless live in a very
oppressed condition there, under a constant state of war surrounded by
vicious enemies. The severity of this is also purposed by God, and that
for prodding to repentance.
But why such
continuous unabated severity?
A key unspoken truth
the intercessory community must acknowledge is that a national curse remains to be broken off the
generations of Israel. This curse is outlined in Deuteronomy 28 and 32.
The song in chapter 32 prophetically portrays the ages of Israel under
this curse, even marking the New Covenantal entry of the Gentiles
(32:21)—until Israel’s final deliverance at the end of these ages.
Israel’s need for
repentance is inextricably tied to the reality of this curse. Indeed,
the repentance thread from Moses to Paul and the thread of the curse
from Deuteronomy through to Paul’s teaching (Gal. 3:10-13; 4:4-5) are intertwined. So to fully
understand the demands of the Repentance Imperative, we must understand
the curse.
Before proceeding, we need to be clear: This is an extremely sensitive subject. The devil has masterfully perverted the truth about the national curse to prevent its reception. He has used the fact of the curse to justify condemnation and destruction of the Jews (as is found in the Quran and the beliefs of the Nazis),35
making the truth of repentance—their only way out from under the curse—all but impossible to hear.
·
Truth
Toward Repentance: Love That Overcomes the
Curse
Nevertheless, love
does not shy from truth—as poisoned as it may become. For only by facing
truth are we set free. And the buried truth regarding Israel is that a
curse must be broken. It is not a curse God put on Israel. It’s a self-inflicted curse, first
activated by Israel’s rejection of the Torah and prophets, then
amplified by their final rejection of God’s Son.
When Yeshua first
came, He came to break the curse of the failed Torah covenant off of
Israel. This was His primary role as the Deliverer. Had Israel repented
under John to receive Yeshua, the Jews would have been delivered from
the curse, and would then in
turn have been delivered from their enemies.
But in rejecting Yeshua, the Jews chose not only to remain under the curse, but further amplified it to their successive generations when they declared, “His blood be on us and on our children.” The intensified external opposition and inward blindness on Israel’s generations since the crucifixion is a continuation of a curse already in force under Deuteronomy 32, decreed by their own fathers.36
Peter issued the
first call for Israel’s repentance to escape the further curse from
Messiah’s rejection (Acts 2). It was a message of love, not of condemnation. But
the call was urgent and the consequences for ignoring it were severe.
The urgency of that message has never changed and remains in force to this
day.
·
The
Curse Without and Within
The curse has two
essential components—one external, the other internal. One speaks to
Satan’s release to foment prejudice, hatred and attacks against Jews
among the nations. The other is to Satan’s habitation within and among the Jews
themselves in the form of extreme religious national
self-consciousness.
Satan’s inspired
vitriol against Jews is the component most readily observable to
everyone, especially to Israel. Aggravated prejudice by men (a “byword” and a “hissing”) is part of what Moses
and the prophets repeatedly pronounced would
occur.
In the last 150 years, hatred of Jews has particularly crystallized in the German and Russian peoples37
as well as the Islamists. The word coined for this prejudice and hatred in modern times is “Antisemitism,” a word that bears within its use the power of the curse (more on this in the second treatise).By contrast, the
curse “within”—the power of satanic national self-absorption—is less
obvious and recognized. But of the two components, it is the more important, especially
as relates to the Jews’ means to deliverance.
o
The
Prison of Racial Self-Consciousness
Through rejecting first the Torah covenant and later their Deliverer, and electing to pursue their own way, the Jewish nation became sentenced to live within a prison of intense national self-consciousness. This consuming self-awareness is a trait of the spirit of madness predicted by Moses (Dt. 28:28), bearing similarity to that which befell Nebuchadnezzar.38
Inside the
self-awareness prison, Jews at large remain bound under powers of deep
self-absorption and victimization. Under self-absorption, Jews may
focus on themselves as the center of reference for all human events and
divine actions—even to the point of superstition.
Under victimization,
Jewish sufferings become the magnet for a concentrated self-pity (“Why us? Woe are we”) that hides
from them responsibility for their own sins and focuses them on
retaliatory hatred of their enemies.
The prison of racial
self-awareness marks the place of Satan’s tormenting habitation among
the Jewish people. Within this habitation, the more religiously devoted
that Jews are to their human heritage, the stronger the powers of
self-absorption and victimization that grip their
hearts.
o
Cycles
of the Curse: Trapped Between the Forces
The
powers of antisemitism and national self-absorption excite and feed off
each other. They conspire to form a seemingly inescapable whirlpool of
hopeless misery for the Jewish people. Trapped between these two
components, the Jewish national experience is marked by a certain
repeating cycle of experience. The cycle goes something like this:
Affliction
by enemies > woundedness > intensified self-consciousness >
More
affliction > more
woundedness > more
intensified self-consciousness, etc.
This
cycle has passed down through the generations. It passes down regardless
of the Jews’ knowledge or ignorance of the original covenant or of what
also happened at the crucifixion. It is simply imprinted into their
collective historical psyche.
o
Deliverance
From the Inside Out
The Lord’s goal is to break this cycle by bringing the nation to a climactic point of repentance, and so effectively lift the Mosaic curse off Israel once and for all. However, the only point at which repentance can take hold and the cycle be broken is the point of intensified self-consciousness out of the woundedness of affliction.39
From
cycle to cycle, each arrival at the next point of heightened
self-awareness becomes more unbearable than the last. At each such
point, the Jewish heart may either yield its self-consciousness to
receive Yeshua whose Spirit still calls from the depths, or it can reinforce its self-consciousness
through more self-centeredness, self-justification, self-deprecation and
retaliation.
At each arrival, a
question faces the Jewish soul:
Will we choose to
reinforce our self-awareness—again? Will we perhaps bemoan ourselves
further for all our suffered injustices and return a curse on our
enemies? Will we further center ourselves on our own uniqueness or sense
of “chosen-ness”? Will we perhaps despise ourselves the more, or perhaps
justify ourselves the more?
Or—will
the national soul at last make the momentous turn of looking outside itself to find
salvation?
Will
we come to the place of finally laying ourselves—our nation, our
race, our heritage—down as our own reference point for reality in all
things—renouncing our claim to be the “masters of our own fate” and the
center of our own universe—to turn to Yeshua on His terms—to the
One Whose whisper we can never quite escape?
This turn of heart
is the goal of the Repentance Imperative. If the national soul can make
that turn, it’s faith toward God will save it. The nation can only be
saved by finally saying “No” to itself. It must finally deny itself as
its own center of gravity. The Jewish national soul must acknowledge the
Lord’s transcendent superiority, accept responsibility for its own
condition, no more blaming the nations for its ills or taking credit for
its limited successes or imagined inherent
virtues.
But
if the national soul chooses rather to reinforce its self-awareness,
then it invites a new round of the cycle. If it prides itself further,
it invites more affliction. Asserting one’s chosen-ness simply riles the
ire of enemies (as Joseph learned). Asserting one’s “historic rights”
and “rightness” does the same. Or, if it takes on the “victim mentality”
and bemoans itself further, it equally invites more affliction.
Self-bemoaning puts a sign on one’s own back that says, “Kick me.”
Every
way, reinforced self-consciousness—until intercepted by
repentance—evokes a new cycle of affliction and woundedness. This is the
nature of the curse under which the Jews have suffered so
long.
·
Amplified
Effects Through the Pre-Restoration
Having
established that God’s main purpose for the Pre-restoration is to bring
to fulfillment the Repentance Imperative, and having also now shown that
Israel’s repentance is keyed to their deliverance from the prison of
self-absorption under the curse, we are in position to see how the
Pre-restoration specifically works toward that deliverance.
By
gathering the Jewish nation into one place—even into the original Land
of Promise, the Pre-restoration has uniquely worked to stoke the curse’s
effects on the Jews toward hastening the final encounter with
self-consciousness that will evoke their repentance and thus
Deliverance. It has amplified the affliction >
woundedness > self-consciousness cycle as never
before.
The
magnified spotlight on the Jews’ century-long national quest has both
raised their profile for opposition by the nations and made them more
self-aware than at any time since the crucifixion. Their intensified
issues, struggles, oppressions and successes due to the Pre-restoration
have all goaded them to even more unbearable points of
self-awareness—points that provide new windows of opportunity for
deliverance through repentance if they are taken.
At a
fearful but momentous final point yet to come, that opportunity will be taken!
-
Recapitulating the Repentance Imperative
The Repentance
Imperative is a spiritually
impartial principle grounded in eternal values that—set in context
of divine claim and appeal through litigation—provides the only
legitimate rule for interpreting God’s modern hand toward the Jewish
people. This is the motivational principle in His stirring to national
reestablishment. By this, He is neither “for” the Jews nor “against”
them in their Land claim, and He is angelically supportive of them only to the degree it supports
His true purpose to bring them to a national repentance and
reconciliation with His Son.
Repentance however
has always been a difficult word to hear and minister properly. It is
often ministered from a spirit of condemnation, which only makes it the
harder to hear. But nothing changes the fact that repentance before the
truth is the only way out of
bondage for anyone, especially Israel. As the way out of bondage,
repentance ministry is a ministry of love.
In all cases,
whether by the goodness of leading to a homeland, or the severity of
oppression in that land under the curse, it is repentance before the truth that
God is lovingly pleading after and which will set the Jewish people
free. And He will stop at nothing short of it. He will accept nothing
less than Israel’s unconditional surrender to the New Covenant.
As in Acts 2, so now
repentance remains Israel’s only way to established eternal nationhood
and deliverance from the Mosaic curse as an adamic body. It is in turn
the only way to completion of the Lord’s transnational Body. The
Repentance Imperative witnessed to by all these things not only explains
the supreme reason for God’s Pre-Restoration of the Jewish nation today,
but presents the only true basis
of intercession for the Jewish people.
33 As I
contended in Palestine Belongs to the Meek,
the Lord is only on His Own side and that of His transcendent
purposes.
34 The conditions surrounding this longing put the Jews into a very uncomfortable position. They can’t hold title to the Land until they surrender to receive Messiah and join the Eternal Israel their existence has always foreshadowed. But they can’t surrender to receive Messiah without first passing through this blind pre-restorational search and return to the Land! Such is the quandary of the design behind the Repentance Imperative.
True discerning intercession for the Jews will respect this design. It will recognize the Lord’s conditional Authorship of the Jews’ desire for the Land and His real intention in stirring that secondary desire. It will also therefore discern between the legitimacy of the desire, and the false, blind futility of the Jewish objective to obtain and maintain right in the Land as “masters of our own fate” under the spirit of Zionism. True intercession will not support that spirit. It will not offer them more snow to drink through championing their political ambitions. It will offer them the Living Water found through repentance and will tie any other earthly aid offered them to that objective.
35
That
nations would argue to justify the persecuting of Israel because of
Israel’s unfaithfulness was prophesied in Jeremiah
50:7.
36 That Israel was still under the Mosaic curse in Yeshua’s time was seen by their continued despised subjection to Gentile empires. The curse’s amplification after Yeshua’s deliverance ministry answers nationally to His word concerning deliverance that “the last state of that man shall be worse than the first.” Paul further illumines our understanding of the curse under Israel’s remaining consciousness of the Mosaic Law since Christ in Gal. 3:13.
37 This crystallization of hatred in the northeastern European peoples corresponds well to the prophecies regarding the end time invasion by Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38-39; Revelation 20:7-9. Note again the connection between a restoration prophecy and the book of Revelation creating a regenerative application to Eternal Israel.)
38 In the “strange” paradoxical realm of spiritual justice and redemption, Nebuchadnezzar was sentenced to the “loss of his mind” in order to “come to his senses” through repentance. The loss of mind was the result of his persistent self-centeredness. It was self-centeredness magnified to the point of mental instability. Yet after so many seasons or “cycles” of time passed over him, he was brought within his prison of madness full circle to repentance, and thus to restored sanity. This pattern has direct application to Israel’s madness of consuming self-awareness under the curse, and in turn to their deliverance, which is outlined further below.
39 This statement is of inestimable importance to understanding and solving the “Jewish problem.” It is also the “ground zero” dividing line between true and false intercession for the Jewish people. The Jews’ repentance can only occur at the point in the affliction cycle where they come one more time to face the maddening mirror of their own soul. Repentance, hence deliverance, cannot occur at the point of outward affliction by enemies.
This
is why the inside dimension of the curse—the prison of
self-absorption—is more important than the outside component of
antisemitism. The primary importance of the inward component explains
why Yeshua majored in casting demons out of the people, not in
overthrowing the Romans. As was true when Yeshua first came, the Jews’
deliverance from the inner prison remains the key to their deliverance
from their enemies and from the entire cycle of torment.
As
pertains to intercession, the curse can only by broken by praying toward
Israel’s deliverance from self-absorption, not by focusing on Israel’s
deliverance from enemies. The curse certainly cannot be broken by
praying for Israel in any way that fuels their self-absorption and
victimization in the name of “supporting Israel.” Such praying only
magnifies the curse’s effects on them.