THE CURSE OF THE NEW ISRAEL: WHY THE CHURCH FAILED THE TEST OF OCTOBER 7TH
Three years ago this week, I was in Nashville with my friends Logan (producer) and Michael (singer) as we cut the final vocals for THE EMMAUS TABLE’s inaugural music release, DEATH + KINGDOM VOL. I: THE DEATH OF DEATH. We decided on Friday October 6th that we would take the next day off and return to the studio on Sunday the 8th to polish our ballad “The Gates of Nain” before finishing the rest of the EP in the following days.
I’d lived in northern Israel for several years before and through the pandemic, mindful of the shadow cast on my neighborhood by Hezbollah over the border, but it was Hamas down south who thrust themselves into our attention more frequently. Every twelve to eighteen months or so, they’d lob a volley of rockets into the Gaza envelope and threaten with further reach at every attack. So when I saw alerts that they were firing rockets again as I went to bed around 22:30 on Friday October 6th, I thought, “Yeah, well, it’s been about a year and a half since the last time (May 2021). Hamas is gonna Hamas.” I set my phone down, put my head on my pillow, and went to sleep.
When I woke up eight hours later, the world had changed.
A RAIL SWITCH OF HUMAN HISTORY
I often say, “We are barreling towards the Day of the LORD,” the climactic moment in human history that ushers in the final redemption. The prophets were so engrossed in this issue, it served as a foundation for Jesus’ core message and became the primary focus of the apostles after the Ascension. One could say we’re been barreling towards this Day since the first iteration of the Gospel just before our exile from Eden.[1] But if you’ll allow me this metaphor, every train travels on a train track. Every track is built into the topography, and any necessary shift in the trajectory or turn in the journey utilizes a rail switch to shift tracks. Noah and his family surviving the flood was a rail switch. Abraham’s covenant in Hebron was a rail switch. The Exodus was a rail switch. The Davidic covenant was a rail switch. The three-decade epoch of the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension was a rail switch. The destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 was a rail switch. The persecution which thrust the early disciples in obedience to the Great Commission, including the apostle Paul, was a rail switch. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was a rail switch. The end of the British Mandate and birth of the modern State of Israel was a very significant rail switch. The Shoah was a painful reminder of what it costs to bear the burden of the Everlasting Covenant—we’ll explore this concept further in a minute. Israel regaining Jerusalem in 1967? Rail switch. And October 7th was its own dreadful reminder of this burden, one which violently thrust the world through what is likely to be one of the last track shifts before we enter the time of Jacob’s trouble.[2]
Since that terrible day—I call it “the world of October 8th”[3]—the “controversy of Zion”[4] has engulfed the globe in a sincerely unprecedented way. In what other moment has history seen streets worldwide full of protestors chanting against the Jewish people? Or worse, in favor of a “globalized intifada”? This latter chant essentially begs for an Islamist takeover of every national system, which (per Islam) requires open season on all Jews everywhere.[5] It should come as no surprise that the paper trails funding these demonstrations, which were test-run during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge,[6] lead to global terror-sponsors such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar[7]—which is where all the Hamas leaders go to live the high life off the money they’ve stolen from Palestinian aid packages. There is a reason why the hundreds of tents pitched across Columbia University, NYU, Yale, UCLA, and other institutions all looked the same.
THE MOMENT WE MISSED
As I watched the horrific crimes Hamas live-streamed and gleefully uploaded on the Black Shabbat, I wondered to myself if we’d finally get it right. If the Church would respond appropriately. If, for one thing, the world would finally see the gruesome threat posed by those who follow Muhammad’s life and ideology—particularly the pervasive, visceral threat Israel faces day-to-day with this network of Iranian terror proxies entrenched on their borders. Sadly, the world skipped right past that moment, and much of the Church went with it. Even as the sun set on October 7th, as many Israelis were still trapped in safe rooms, before we could even begin to understand how many were dead, missing, or dragged into the rats nest tunnel network Hamas dug under Gaza, a pro-Palestinian demonstration took place in West London. Paperwork had already been filed to hold a larger one a week later. By the next day, while Logan, Michael, and myself were in the studio, anti-Israel protests were already breaking out in NYC, D.C., Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Montreal. They spread the next day. On October 9th, a thousand-strong mob hijacked a Jewish vigil at the Sydney Opera House, chanting “Where’s the Jews?” And “F– the Jews!” as they overtook the service.
Homes in Israel were literally still burning down. Terrorists were still on the loose in Israel.
And no one cared.
We are three years deep into a historic opportunity—more than that, a historic sifting—to be a brother to the Jewish people, a proverbial brother “born for trouble,” or born for war.[8] We had an opportunity to say, “Hey, you want to get to them? You’ve gotta go through me first.” And we did not. We have not. The zeitgeist that allowed Jewish neighbors to be abused, arrested, detained, and transported to death camps, gas chambers, and furnaces is the same zeitgeist allowing for their dehumanization, abuse, defamation, and suspicion today. The zeitgeist that firebombs a synagogue is the same zeitgeist that quietly watches it burn. The zeitgeist that fatally attacks and kills an elderly Jewish man at a hostage rally in California is the same zeitgeist that tears the hostage posters of an eight-month old baby down, and it’s the same zeitgeist that refuses to mention the problem from the pulpit. The zeitgeist that drives a 31-year-old Hispanic American to gun down a young Israeli-American Jewish couple leaving a humanitarian event in D.C. is the same zeitgeist that drives a guy with “Christ is King” in his bio to celebrate their murder online. It’s the same zeitgeist that drives thousands to “like” and “retweet” the post. No wonder grifting podcasters are running with this narrative.
Much in the same way Jesus tells us in the Sermon on the Mount that crimes like murder and adultery are fruit born from soil and seedbed present in any heart that nurtures anger and lust, so too does the world’s oldest hatred find friendly environment to grow in any human heart that does not militantly fight to uproot it. Antisemitism is the irresistible siren song seducing every generation of Adam and Eve’s children since Abraham’s family first formed. We need God to save us from it for the same reasons we need God to simply save us to begin with.
So how did the people who proclaim His salvation so terribly fail the test of October 7th?
THE ARROGANCE OF CHRISTIAN IGNORANCE
“Set fire to their synagogues and schools,” said the man largely credited with the final ignition of the Protestant Reformation, and who later served Hitler’s manual for societal Jew-hatred.[9] These same synagogues are “dwellings of demons,” which is fitting as “the Jews themselves are demons,” per John Chysostom.[10] He and Martin Luther span more than a thousand years of church history, yet their refrain remained the same, echoing so many others we still refer to as “church fathers” who departed from the foundation laid by the Hebrew prophets and apostles to lay a new one: The Church is the new Israel. By necessity, now, all the prophecies and promises in Scripture which hopefully paint a very literal redemption of very literal creation—a transformation hinging on a very literal resurrection—are simply figurative, allegorical ideas to give us warm and fuzzy vibes. As Justin Martyr wrote, Christians are the “true spiritual Israel.”[11] Many defend this idea, despite the fact that it runs in such violent counter to the prophets, because of a passage in Romans 9 wherein Paul writes, “For not all who are descended from Israel are Israel…it is not the physical children who are children of God, but the children the promise refers to who are considered seed.”[12] This is on the heels of Romans 8, a breathtaking survey of the regenerative work of the Spirit on those who call upon Jesus. But it is not enough to launch seminary degree programs reinterpreting the prophets, the apostles, or even Paul himself as though this is what he taught. However, to our detriment, we ignore that just a few breaths later Paul explicitly instructed and warned us to “not be ignorant of this mystery [of Israel], lest” we become “arrogant” and “boast against the branches,” completely missing the mission of God: “that all Israel will be saved.”[13]
We not only did not listen to Paul, we’ve instead built a nearly 2,000-year church tradition on the ignorance and arrogance he warned us against. If your pastor graduated from a seminary that essentially teaches a logic pipeline of “Jews rejected Jesus >> Jesus rejected Jews for.ev.er. >> We are His favorite now” then it will not surprise you to conclude that Christians inherit all God’s blessings in the Old Testament (never mind that we don’t understand them), but the degenerate “Christ-killers” keep all the curses. How convenient for us.
But maybe we are wrapping the curse of our own pride like a noose around our neck. And if there’s anything God hates, it’s the carnal ego. He detests pride, and our theology is dripping with it.[14]
Much in the same way Paul spoke to the crowd in Athens and appealed to God’s long-suffering, He is generous to overlook ignorance until it is inexcusable.[15] He let us get away with absolutely appalling Jew hatred infusing early Christian theology from Justin Martyr to Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, even to men like Luther and Calvin making sense of that same system a millennia later. We have to stop teaching a false gospel that flies in the face of the biblical prophets, apostles, and Jesus Himself.
God overlooked it for a time. But that was the world of October 6th.
We live now in the world of October 8th.
October 7th was a rail switch.
THE BURDEN OF STEWARDSHIP
There is a real cost and burden of stewarding the Everlasting Covenant, referred to by Jeremiah as the “new covenant with Israel and the house of Judah,”[16] and the writer of Hebrews as the covenant for which Jesus shed His blood to pay for.[17] It is the covenant first cut with Abram in the hills of Hebron, under the oak trees of Mamre.[18] And it is this inheritance through Abraham’s son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob, that drew all Jacob’s sons and daughters to four centuries of slavery in a foreign nation before being drawn out in the Exodus.[19] No one in the “spiritual Israel” has paid that price. It is this inheritance that drew the freshly liberated slaves to Sinai for wedding vows with the Almighty.[20] No Christian has made these vows, and none are held responsible for them. It is this inheritance, these vows, this stewardship that binds the children of Jacob—even till today—to the terms and conditions of the Mosaic Covenant made at Sinai. These are detailed in the Song of Moses declared at the end of his life.[21] There are blessings and curses therein that apply to the people, nation, and land of Israel per the terms and conditions of the Mosaic Covenant. They teach us about the nature and character of God, to be sure, but they do not apply to Gentiles professing the LORD any more than the 613 laws of Torah do—which also teach us about the nature and character of God and certainly inform the behavioral tenets and expectations of Christian living,[22] but we are not Jewish and therefore are not responsible for bearing the burden of the Torah. We cannot claim exemption from the curses and ownership of the blessings. This is a manifestation of the arrogance Paul explicitly warned us about.[23]
October 7th is a consequence of this covenant.[24] It is a heavy, heavy thing to bear. And we Christians have failed the test presented to the world through that day, as it sifts the hearts and minds of men, because our church traditions built a theological system that did not prepare us for it. But those days must end. Those unbiblical ideas must be renounced. We must evaluate our own fruit and repent. The LORD promised He could make Jerusalem a cup of staggering and stupor for all nations,[25] and we have been found wanting. The rage of the nations lashing against Jerusalem has intoxicated the nations, and too many in the Church cannot recognize it. It should be a simple thing to recognize the miracle of the flyDubai flight rescue mid-air, yet too many professing Christians have immediately accused the Israelis of a false flag. We should be worshipping in awe at the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.[26] But our fragmented understanding of “this Gospel of the Kingdom”[27] through nearly two millennia of biblically illiterate traditions has created knowledge gaps, and those knowledge gaps have created power vacuums heretics have been only too eager to fill—especially because they get paid every time you click on their content. Replacement theology has proven itself to be a gateway drug to sideways conspiracies at the end of the age. It must be renounced. Paul warned us, and we did not listen.
But we can listen now. This will require profound humility and repentance on our part.
GOD IS IN THE GATES
In the throes of the Nazi rise to power, Dietrich Bonhoeffer declared on German radio: “Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.” This is more powerfully underlined knowing so many Sunday morning services took place near train tracks during the Holocaust, and the noisy cars barreling by disrupted the proceedings. The congregants’ response, knowing full well who was in those cars and where they were going? To sing louder—to drown out the noise. We failed the test of the Shoah. Yet we devour books and movies about Bonhoeffer and Corrie Ten Boom and Oskar Schindler. We imagine ourselves as such brave heroes, “righteous among the nations.” Yet here we are facing our own moment, our own version of the 1930s, and we are failing. We are the cowards simply singing our cute little Christian songs a little bit louder. Boy George had the backbone to intercede, and recently released a song called “We Will Dance Again.”[28] It met the moment like a balm to bleeding hearts still wounded by the trauma of the Hamas pogrom on October 7th, and the following vitriol of the world accusing Israelis of deserving it. Yet professing Christians condemned him for his lifestyle instead. But where are the Christians willing to put themselves on the line?
I do not ignore the irony that I was in Nashville on October 7th to record songs about the hope we have in the triumphant return of Jesus. And I am grateful for how a song about the resurrection, “The Gates of Nain,” forced my grieving heart to calibrate back to the hope of the “kingdom drawing nigh.”[29] The line in the chorus, “When He screams, the dead are raised,” is taken from the passage in Luke but ultimately points to the Day the LORD, like a mighty man of war, erupts with His own shouts and makes good on all His promises to settle the controversy of Zion and bring peace to Jerusalem—the peace we are petitioned to pray for now.[30]
If we bear this hope, we must also reckon with the privilege to be the younger brother free of the eldest’s responsibilities.[31] We are grafted into this arrangement, and despite what the men we call “church fathers” taught, we did not uproot and replace that cultivated olive tree.[32] The parable of the prodigal son is left open-ended, but imagine if the younger brother left his party to pursue his older brother, the one he’d betrayed, and describe for him his own perilous journey, and the magnificent revelation of their Father he’d received upon repentance. What if we could be a humble younger brother, who recognize that this is still a family, and we owe a debt to our older brother?
A primary criticism Christians have leveled against Jews is that they couldn’t read the forest for the trees and rejected Jesus as His purposes played out in their day. They missed the moment. I submit we ourselves are guilty of exactly this. We do not have a right to boast against Jacob. And in this hour especially, we have a burden of responsibility to serve him. Or, per Bonhoeffer, we need to quit singing all our songs that rip off their stories to make us feel better about our own lives.
We are barreling towards the Day of the LORD. I pray we repent, and I pray we prepare.
Maranatha.
[1] See Genesis 3:15, 22-24
[2] See Jeremiah 30:7
[3] See https://youtu.be/0jHDr1c5myE?si=T0p-ba7OTUki7Pqm
[4] Isaiah 34:8
[5] Sahih Muslim 2922, the “Hadith of the Gharqad Tree,” stipulates that the Day of Judgment will not arrive until Muslims fight, defeat, and kill all the Jews.
[6] See https://time.com/3007491/israel-gaza-invasion-protests/
[7] See https://isgap.org/follow-the-money/ from ISGAP, and https://www.thefp.com/p/how-the-muslim-brotherhood-built-media-empire and https://www.thefp.com/p/campus-rage-middle-eastern-roots-qatar from The Free Press.
[8] Proverbs 17:17
[9] Martin Luther wrote On the Jews and Their Lies in 1543. Hitler and his Nazi cronies put it to good use as they implemented their Nuremberg Laws and Final Solution.
[10] John Chysostom, Against the Jews, Homily 1. See https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chrysostom_adversus_judaeos_01_homily1.htm
[11] Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho. See https://patristics.kdn.dev/works/justin-dialogue-trypho/
[12] Romans 9:6b, 8
[13] Romans 11:25-26, see also 11:19-24
[14] See Proverbs 6:16-17; 16:5; Isaiah 2:12; Daniel 4:37
[15] Acts 17:30
[16] Jeremiah 31:31; see also Hebrews 8:8
[17] Hebrews 13:20
[18] See Genesis 15
[19] See Genesis 15:13; Exodus 1:1-14; 12:40
[20] See Exodus 19-24
[21] See Deuteronomy 27, 28, 30, 32:1-43
[22] See Acts 15; Romans 12; Ephesians 4-5; Galatians 5; 1 Timothy 3:1-7; Titus 1:5-9; 1 Peter 2-3; 5:1-4
[23] Romans 11:25
[24] See Deuteronomy 28:15-68
[25] Zechariah 12:1-2
[26] See https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeAuw9FOYIL/?stkn=MXZtaHJiaTdoMjFtag==
[27] Matthew 24:14
[28] See https://www.instagram.com/reels/DbRfqzEtwZx/
[29] Luke 10:9; 21:28-31; Mark 1:15
[30] See Isaiah 34:8; 42:13; Psalm 122:6
[31] See Luke 15:11-32
[32] See Romans 11
Stephanie Quick (@quicklikesand) is the founder and creative director of The Emmaus Table. She lives in the Golan Heights and hosts the TABLE TALKS podcast. Browse her free music, films, and books in THE EMMAUS TABLE App and at stephaniequick.org.