re: #415 Walter L. Newton

Here is one example:

thereitis.org

The vast majority of Jews desperately want to avoid a full-scale conflagration between Israel and the Arab world. Dispensationalists don’t. In the dispensationalist narrative, Christians will be raptured to heaven before all the fighting between Jews and Muslims starts. Everyone left will face mass death and destruction. “Some people see some of the imagery in Revelation being caused by nuclear weapons,” says Brodrick. Thus evangelical Christians’ support for policies like the permanent takeover the West Bank and Gaza and even, in some cases, the expulsion of Palestinians into Jordan, should be understood in the context of a worldview in which world war is inevitable.

Eckstein recalls an ad for a prophesy book in Charisma magazine that said the post-rapture tribulations would “make the Holocaust seem like a party.” Though he believes most evangelicals are more “humble and responsible” than that author, he says, “There are those who are so definitive and absolute about the future, and their theology does entail the destruction of millions of Jews in the battle of Armageddon. I believe it says in the Book of Revelation that the blood will be so high that it will reach the bridle of a horse.”

Dispensationalist Christians believe that this is all in the service of establishing the reign of Christ on earth. Yet while they chase this fantasy, they’re content to put real lives — Jewish lives — on the line. “It doesn’t make me feel any better when they tell me to keep the whole West Bank when I don’t think that’s for the benefit of Israel politically,” says Gorenberg. “When somebody’s hope for where Israeli policy will lead is Armageddon, clearly they’re going to be judging things differently.”

Here’s a Jewish perspective on the subject:

jewishjournal.com