Excerpt from Jonathan Martin's, On Israel, the Church, Politics and Jesus.
There are still a distressing number of Christians, many of whom
citing Scripture as quickly (and as recklessly) as the micro-machine man
Jack Van Impe, who believe not only that Israel as a modern
nation-state is especially chosen by God, but that the will of God is
for us to stand by Israel in war. In fact, many of them express a
perverse pleasure when there is suffering in the Middle East, because
these are mere signs that the end is drawing near. That end is not
defined first and foremost as the reign of the prince of peace breaking
into the world with healing for the nations, but the vindication of
those on the right side of Armageddon by the heavenly godfather. The
means by which Jesus will come to rule and reign will not be the cross
(which failed) but a larger sword than that of the infidels. “With the
Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other,” they sincerely and
wrongheadedly expect the reign of God to be manifest in human violence.
I do not have time in a short treatment here to say all I’d like to
about what’s wrong with these systems. But at heart is a fundamental
misreading of the Book of Revelation. The apocalyptic language and
imagery can easily be misinterpreted. Revelation is a book about how
God overcomes the evil of the world through the cross of Jesus. It is
through the blood of the Lamb that God wins in the end. His people do
not share in His victory by beating their enemies with bigger weapons,
but by sharing in the sacrifice of the Lamb, “following the Lamb
wherever He goes…loving not their own lives even unto death.” The
subversive victory of love and sacrifice over the forces of the evil
make a mockery of the so-called principalities and powers of the world,
from the Roman empire to every tyrannical and oppressive empire in our
own time.
The cross is not just the message of the kingdom, the cross is the
means of the kingdom. The trouble with a lot of popular eschatology is
that it assumes Jesus did not win through the cross and resurrection,
and will have to resort to something other than the way of the cross to
accomplish His purposes in the world. There is of course much language
of judgment in Revelation. But judgment does not come through guns—“Out
of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the
nations.” God will judge His creation by the same means in which He
brought it into existence—by His word.
8. The response of the people of God to conflict in the Middle East is not to take a side but to take up a cross.
Don’t get me wrong: Jesus Himself said that the days to come would be
full of wars and rumors of wars. But the manifestation of the sons of
God will not be through us being on the “right” side of any of those
wars, but on the side of radical enemy love. We want to be on the side
of the one who, even on the cross, said “Forgive them Father for they
know what they do.” There are no other sides besides the way of the
kingdom and the way of the world, the way of the cross and the way of
the sword. There are no middle ground alternatives.
No matter what your persuasion or how you interpret the
sociopolitical dimensions of this conflict, all authentic followers of
Jesus should be able to agree that “God so loved the whole world
that He gave His only begotten Son;” and that God’s desire in and
through Jesus Christ is for all people in all parts of the world to be
blessed and whole. I think to simply get the people of God together on
these handful of basic assumptions could make all the difference in how
we learn to be the Church for the world.
The world tells us to take sides; we are told to take up our cross.
We are called to bear witness to the kingdom of God by living our own
lives as peacemakers. We pray for peace, we work for peace. We learn
as much as we can about our brothers and sisters in the Middle East and
we support kingdom work among them–from the preaching of the gospel to
caring for the poor, the marginalized, the orphan, the widow and the
oppressed. We refuse any options that are presented to us other than
the cross–which means we look for ways to sacrifice our own comfort for
the sake of hurting people all over the world.
See the whole article here.
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