“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”
Matthew 23:23
What is the most divisive topic in the whole Bible? Justification by faith? Some might say this, considering it was central to the Reformation, at least from the perspective of some Protestants. Sexuality? Others might say this because the Bible challenges many of the sexual idols of the age. Baptism? The early Baptists were willing to die for their view of believer’s baptism. There are many different options people could put forward. But many would put forward the topic of eschatology.
And they would have a good argument. A really good argument!
Some people take their eschatology really personally. But this is important to note, many, many, many people would put eschatology in the harder to understand bracket and would say we should hold many aspects of it with an open hand. The Premillennialist believes Jesus returns to establish the kingdom and the millennial reign. The Amillennialist believes that we are in the millennium, now reigning with Christ. The postmillennialist believes that the Millennium could begin any day now and that the church will rise in triumph and Christ will come back to vindicate our work. The preterist believes most things have been fulfilled. Of course, there is overlap between all these views as well.
But the Dispensationalist, and a growing number of people influenced by Dispensational claims but who are not Dispensational, says at one time that they hold end times with an open hand, but in the next moment many of them turn around and say that Israel is justified in doing what it needs to do to conquer the land because of their end times view. They want to have their proverbial cake and eat it too.
As I saw someone say just recently,
“A Christian will be influenced by their views on end times or eschatology, and this will impact how they interpret war involving Israel. Some will see it as a divine necessity, others as another pointless political conflict, and still others that what is required is a true peace maker to fix the situation. Someone’s theological ideas and framework will influence whether they should support Israel automatically and see it as the default position, or whether we should be more cautious or even very critical.”[1]
So, in effect, this hits right to the core of this issue. A massive problem in the church today is that a large swath of Christians, most of them dispensationalist, but some of them not, have taken the most disputable topic in the Bible, eschatology or end times prophecy, and have taken a niche interpretation of this difficult topic and lifted it up as justification for what Israel is doing in the present. They have claimed a strong position on the flimsiest possible ground. They have incorrectly weighed the word of God.
Now, it must be said that not every Christian who says, “I stand with Israel”, thinks about it in an end-times framework. For some, it is simply that Israel is a democracy and the Arab world is not, so they default to this. For still others it is simply a binary choice between Islam and Israel, and they will choose Israel every day of the week in that situation and be shocked that others do not see it this simply. But for a large swath of Christians, this is a tenet of faith. They have taken passages in the Bible about the return of Israel to the land and sided with a niche interpretation of these passages, and then they turn around and use this to justify everything Israel does as simple “self-defence in the quest to get back the land God says is theirs.” They are placing a tertiary concept in an almost primary position when they do this, because they are letting this work out in our world in a way that actually impacts the lives of many people.
But think of the foolishness of this stance. Jesus spoke to just this kind of misaligned application of the word of God in Matthew 23. There he said, “23 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others” (Matt. 23:23). Almost every Christian admits that eschatology is a difficult topic to handle. For every interpretation of a passage that says Israel will return to the land and the temple will be destroyed again, there are many more Christians who say this was fulfilled in the era of Ezra and Nehemiah, and AD 70, and that is the end of the subject. So, even if you read the Bible differently on these subjects, you have to admit that it is a highly debatable topic.
But what is not debatable is what the Bible says about law, justice, and war. For instance, the Bible is very clear about not violating borders. We see for example in Proverbs that Solomon said, “28 Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set” (Prov. 22:28). When Israel was about to go into the land they were commanded not to take even a foot land of the Edomites, “5 Do not contend with them, for I will not give you any of their land, no, not so much as for the sole of the foot to tread on, because I have given Mount Seir to Esau as a possession” (Deut. 3:5). Nor were they do this to anyone else, either. This principle came from the law of God, “14 You shall not move your neighbour’s landmark, which the men of old have set, in the inheritance that you will hold in the land that the Lord your God is giving you to possess” (Deut. 19:14).
However, the entire history of the modern nation of Israel has been one long, consistent process of violating the original borders of the original mandate. There are secular arguments that can be made for the founding of Israel as it was done, and also against it. But the religious arguments are all based in very niche interpretations of end times prophecy. However, the principle of justice that you should not violate your neighbour’s borders is a clear principle in the Bible, and a weightier matter of the law than eschatology.
The same is true with not killing children. This was actually a command in the Old Testament for just war. Moses wrote, “But the women and the little ones, the livestock, and everything else in the city, all its spoil, you shall take as plunder for yourselves. And you shall enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the Lord your God has given you” (Deut. 20:14). Just war against foreign nations, outside of the limited city states in Canaan, included not killing women and children, or non-combatants. The nations that Israel dealt with under the exception in the conquest no longer exist; hence, the exception no longer exists, and this command, therefore, stands.
Many people are up here and note that Israel’s enemies use kids as human shields. But those who use 2000-pound bombs on civilian centres are mocking you when they say they are seeking to minimise casualties. Right?
This argument could be carried over to many other aspects of what Israel is doing. Many of the people supporting Israel in its actions today were condemning Russia in Ukraine yesterday. But when it comes to Israel, they change their standard of what is allowed and what is righteous and say that Israel is God’s people, this conquest is fulfilling biblical prophecy, therefore it is excusable. They change their weighting of the higher principles of the law because of a niche view of eschatology. Which is to read the Bible backwards.
If this is not an example of what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 23, then I do not know what is.
This is not a defence of Iran. Both Iran and Israel have a long history of making threats against each other. This article is simply an attempt to help people realise that you should not change your weighting of the principles of justice and law, and oppression, because of your personal beliefs about the most difficult topic, in many people’s opinions, in the Bible. Eschatology is a fascinating subject, and one well worth studying. If for nothing more than allowing yourself to be humbled by how much God’s plan is out of our league, and how much we need to be humble with his word.
But when you are justifying real world wrongs because of your eschatology you are judging with weighted scales, and we know what the Bible says about that, “A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight” (Prov. 11:1). Weighting the argument unjustly, because of pet theories about how the end times will work out causes great harm, and it is not correctly dividing the word of truth. Some of the people who are making decisions in the US and British governments in support of Israel’s ongoing conquest of a segment of the Middle East make their decisions in light of this end-time reading. This is incredibly dangerous. Government officials are supposed to be exercising just applications of law, not applying speculative end times theories. Christians are supposed to challenge government leaders on principles of law and justice, not speculative end times theories.
There is a principle in biblical interpretation that the clear should interpret the less clear. Those who support Israel’s actions based on eschatology do the exact opposite. They interpret the clear through the most unclear thing possible. This creates many pitfalls and dangers. And I wonder if many of these Christians even realise what they are doing?
The simple solution to this is to weigh justice and law above end times theories. You will find that when you remove the end times framework that he dispensationalists have spread from the 19th century, and which many other Christians have imbibed, the issue begins to look very different, very, very different.
[1] I saw someone say this publicly, but I have changed the wording and not named who they are because it is not charitable or necessary. This comment is fairly representative of how people who are Christian Zionists think, hence consider it more of a type than simply one person’s comment.
