A Biblical Perspective on the Israel-Gaza War

I hesitated to post this month on the Israel-Gaza War because it would have been extremely long, and I don’t want to get political. But I concluded that I would be remiss if I did not at least post a biblical perspective that doesn’t get in the news. I’m limiting myself to that here, though there’s so much more to say from different perspectives. If you’d like the full four-pages of uncommon perspectives, you may email me, and I’ll send it.

• Israel was among the earliest nation states that is still a nation state today. The land called Israel / Palestine / the Holy Land—from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, Lebanon to the southern desert—was established by King David as the nation of Israel in approximately 1000 BC. That’s 3000 years ago. The Muslims drove the Jews out of their land in AD 637. The Crusades regained the Holy Land, then lost it in 1187. Then the Ottoman Turks ruled over it until 1917 and then Great Britain until 1948. Jews started returning during the British protectorate. After the Nazi Holocaust the Western nations agreed the Jews needed their homeland back. In all the time Israel was exiled from their land, it was never another sovereign nation of any kind. Thus in the long historical view, Israel is not an occupier at all. They got their land back.
  
• The Quran itself actually says in Sura 5, verses 20–21 that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews: Allah has “assigned” the “holy land” to those who followed Moses, i.e., the Israelites.
  
• The Jews are determined to keep the West Bank in part because that is God’s biblical mandate of Israel’s boundaries to them prior to entering the land in Numbers 34:1–12. It is reiterated to them prior to re-entering the land after exile in Ezekiel 47:13–23. Biblically, the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and Lebanon to the desert is established by God and is non-negotiable. (This is different from the potential boundaries God offered Israel in Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Joshua that would have extended all the way to the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq, but Israel never attain that.)
  
• There is certainly a spiritual force of evil working behind the scenes. The Bible calls it in Hebrew “the adversary,” which in English is “Satan.” There is no other rational foundation for such endless, often irrational, and everlasting hatred toward one small ethnicity and nation of people. And these people are those through whom God has revealed himself and will continue to reveal himself. Of course, Satan hates them. The people we see today who kill and scream for the destruction of Israel are arguably pawns in the hands of this evil. Yet those who recognize the validity of the Bible know that all that is going on is ultimately part of God’s big picture of what will happen in what is called the end of the age. We’re not there yet, but it surely seems to be getting closer.
  
• To believers I say, “Take heart. God is still on the throne, and he is working above and beyond the limited perspective we see here on earth.”

Map courtesy of NPR