This video is a very slick, visually alluring attack on the activities of Christian Zionists.
An image from the movie "With God on our side", that attacks Christian support for Israel.
Some of you may have heard about a video currently making large waves in the English speaking Christian world called “With God on our Side.”
Viewpoints:
from Aaron in Jerusalem.
This video is a very slick, visually alluring attack on the activities of Christian Zionists. Among other things, it repeats the canard that Christian Zionists are simply supporting Israel because we want to usher in Armageddon. It also accuses Christian Zionists of being racists who support Israel because we hate Arabs (including Arab Christians) and don’t care about their suffering, etc.
This film is gaining wide circulation in the Christian world and there have already been churches in the US and Europe which stopped supporting Messianic congregations here in Israel after watching this movie.
To me, that just proves that their roots in the Bible and the Spirit were probably never very deep to begin with, and we would have lost their support sooner or later anyway.
One of the chief voices in the film is a professor from Wheaton College in Illinois named Dr. Gary Burge. Wheaton used to be one of the premier Evangelical Christian institutions in the US but it has started to slip in recent years.
Dr. Gary Burge.
For his part, Dr. Burge unapologetically paints the Gospel in secular humanist hues, not only in the classroom but in the numberous books and other publications he produces. The fact that he is a “Professor at a prominent Evangelical Protestant University” gives him credibility he doesn’t deserve.
But Dr. Burge does say one thing in the movie that is absolutely true.
He tells people watching that they must choose between basing their support for either Israel or the Palestinians (a false choice, but never mind) on “prophecy, or justice.”
He’s absolutely right.
“Prophecy” meaning, the Bible, is the ONLY reason anyone has for supporting the State of Israel.
If one is more concerned with humanist ideas of “justice” than one should not support the State of Israel.
Dr. Gary Burge and those like him have made their choice, to treat the Bible like a salad bar, taking the parts they like, ignoring the rest, twisting the plain, unambiguous meaning of passages that are too obvious even for them to ignore and filling in the blanks with secular humanist ideas like “justice” and “social progress.”
Dr. Burge is also one of the foremost voices in academia promoting the idea that “Jesus’s message and sayings must be taken in their cultural and historic context” which is just a fancy way of saying that Jesus was just a man like any other and what He had to say is interesting but not particularly relevant for us today.
If you believe that than how much more irrelevant are the promises that God made to the Children of Israel in the Old Testament, including the promise that the Land of Israel would be theirs “for an everlasting possession”?
Dr. Burge is a textbook (no pun intended) example of what happens when you take an academic view of the Bible and go looking for “The historical Jesus” instead of the Jesus who is alive and the same “yesterday, today and forever.”
As the angel in the empty tomb asked Mary Magdelane (and all of us, including Gary Burge) “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
Jesus is not dead, He is risen, He is alive, He is sitting right now at the right hand of the Father, and what He said 2000 years ago here in Jerusalem He was saying to us here today as much as He was saying to those who were with Him at that time.
With all due respect to Dr. Gary Burge’s many academic achievements, publications and titles, the “historical context” of Jesus’ teachings are irrelevant, because the wisdom and commandments He spoke were coming from God Himself, who is eternal and does not operate in human terms of cultural or historic “context.”
If you don’t believe that, than there’s no reason to call yourself a “Christian” because you’ve rejected the very foundational belief upon which the word and the concept is based.
It is useful to study the world Jesus lived in because it can help you understand some of His parables and some of the terminology. But if you take it further than that, you’re just giving the flesh an opening to mislead you away from the plain, unambiguous meaning of His timeless message. Some people take this in another direction and get caught up in the “Jewishness” of Jesus and start aping the Rabbinic traditions, but that’s a message for a different email.
All of that having been said, if you have seen this movie “With God on our side” or if you are trying to argue with someone who has seen it and is now trying to convince you that your support for Israel is not righteous, one of the best tools I can give you is the knowledge that many of the most passionate and on-fire Believers who support this country are Arabs who used to be Moslems.
Since they became Believers, God put His love for Israel and the Jewish people in their hearts, and they are now spokesman for the very “Christian Zionism” that is so vilified in this “With God on Our Side” movie.
Below is a link to an article about one such man, and those of us who work in media are working on putting together more such accounts.
In the meantime, please share this article far and wide with as many people as you can, and continue to pray for truth and righteousness to shine forth through the lies and deceit of the Enemy, and those who (perhaps unknowingly) do the Enemy’s work in this world.
God bless you all!
Link to an interesting article in Jerusalem Post.
Read more about “With God on our side“.
First published 25.08.2010.
Written by Ivar
Posted by ivarfjeld 
