There is a photograph circulating this week of an IDF soldier caving in the face of a Jesus statue with a mallet in a Lebanese Christian village Israel turned to rubble. Evangelicals claimed the outrage was overblown because “it’s just an image.” As though, the entire point isn’t the living, breathing images of God systemically terrorized by Israel, watching through the window as soldiers commit war crimes on their back lawn.
When the world saw an IDF soldier, having torn down a Jesus statue in a civilian non-combatant’s home garden, standing over it with a mallet and smiling for the camera, the response from the American evangelical machine was essentially to shrug, talk about the chaos of war, and then - the same people with flannel graph Jesuses in their children’s churches and AI Jesuses on their Facebook page wrapped in an Israeli flag - gave us lectures on idolatry and even thanked the soldier for so virtuously defending the Second Commandment.
They dropped brilliant Jesus Jukes like, “That’s not Jesus. Jesus is at the right hand of God,” as though we don’t know His current address. They said things like, “Ackshually, that soldier should be paid for services rendered, because that’s really just an idol.” You know, genius observations like that, from evangelicals who suddenly became committed iconoclasts the moment they saw the photo and no sooner. Or others, for the first time in their lives, found concern about the doctrine of Sola Fide, who lectured us about why they don’t really count as Christians. They were the same ones calling us Nazis for arguing that Europeans cosplaying as ancient Hebrews don’t really count as Jews.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m an iconoclast of the Reformed Protestant persuasion, and have been for decades. We don’t have images of Jesus in our home, a nativity set on our front lawn, watch films depicting Christ, or have books with Him fictionalized. At Pulpit & Pen, I’d write posts at Christmas defending historic Christian iconoclasm as it pertained to nativity sets. They were not popular posts with evangelicals, to put it mildly, who denounced me as a legalist. And one year, after teaching through the Baptist catechism on the Second Commandment, I made the giant stained-glass Jesus behind the pulpit, built into the sanctuary wall, quietly disappear. The point is, I’m not a fan of using Jesus’ image as a garden gnome.
But there’s a difference between the Reformer, William Farel, ripping the crucifix off a nun’s neck and throwing it into the river, and Mehmed II plastering over the walls of the Hagia Sophia. One was done out of reverence for the God it depicted. The other, to desecrate him. And confused about why these are different scenarios, evangelicals literally lined up to vocally approve of Israelis bombing a Christian village, rolling into the rubble, and stopping to terrorize professing Christians, tearing down their religious imagery, and committing a literal war crime (according to Hague Convention Article 27, adopted in 1954, and the Geneva Convention Additional Protocol I, Article 53, adopted 1977) by desecrating religous imagery and destroying their private property. So if you wonder if there’s a limit to the horridness of Christian Zionists, or the capacity of evangelicals to miss the point, there is not.
And despite me not caring much for the stained glass Jesus in the sanctuary wall, which was there a good five or so years into my pastorate before I removed it, had a worshipper of some false god come into the sanctuary to destroy it, they’d have done so over my dead body, and I had a shotgun rack in the pulpit. That’s a thing some Protestants do to an icon we find in our possession. That’s not something we let a Satanic death-cult do to terrorize third-world Christians unlucky enough to stand between the IDF and what they consider a good time.
TARGETED OPPRESSION
Almost none of Israel’s attacks on Christians in Lebanon have a legitimate military purpose. The villages of southern Lebanon that Israel has been systematically destroying are Maronite Christian communities. Rmeich. Al Qlayaa. Derdghaya. The Marjayoun district. These villages have no meaningful Hezbollah presence, no military installations, and no strategic value as targets except that they exist and the people in them have been living there for two thousand years, and Israel would apparently prefer they didn’t. Israel’s official justification for the Derdghaya church strike, the one that killed eight people sheltering inside, was that it was directed at militiamen. No militiamen were ever produced, and no evidence of militiamen was ever found. It never is.
Amnesty International analyzed the destruction of over ten thousand structures in southern Lebanon across a four-month period and concluded that the Israeli military carried out extensive destruction without any apparent imperative military necessity, which is the legal standard required under international humanitarian law. Visual evidence confirmed there were no Hezbollah fighters inside the civilian structures at the time of their destruction.
On April 8, Israel launched what it called Operation Eternal Darkness, striking over one hundred targets across Lebanon in ten minutes, killing at least 357 people, many of them Christians. None were known to be Hezbollah terrorists. Strikes hit central Beirut without prior warning during rush hour in busy commercial and residential neighborhoods. The BBC assessed the military gains of the operation as likely “next to nothing.”
Israel also struck a church-sponsored social housing complex in Ain Saade, a Christian locality near Beirut, killing a local Christian politician, his wife, and their neighbor. The IDF’s justification was that a Hezbollah member was allegedly hiding nearby. That is the complete and entire justification. A Hezbollah member was allegedly in the vicinity, so the Christian social housing complex received a missile, Christians lay dead, and the IDF expressed regret that they were not the intended target. That is the operational standard being applied to Christian villages. Proximity to a Hezbollah member, alleged, unverified, and unprovable to the dead, is sufficient grounds to destroy whatever Christian structure is nearest and apologize about the bodies afterward.
The church in Derdghaya was struck by Israel in 1978. It was struck again in 1992. It was struck again in 2024, and this time eight people died inside it. The same church, struck three times, across five decades. Not a single terrorist had been in the church at any time. The Maronite Christians of southern Lebanon are not human shields for Hezbollah. They are a population that has occupied that geography since before Islam existed, before their prophet was born, before the religion that produced Hezbollah had its first convert. The pattern of destruction visited upon their churches, their homes, and their clergy across multiple Israeli military campaigns is not explained by military necessity. Military necessity does not strike the same church three times in forty-six years. Military necessity does not kill a priest with artillery and then hit the same spot again when the villagers come running to pull out the wounded. Military necessity does not bomb Christian social housing because a Hezbollah member was allegedly somewhere in the neighborhood (never to be found or substantiated).
The American evangelical church, which has the access, influence, platform, and relationships to demand an accounting, has instead been in the comment section explaining why the Jesus-bashing mallet was justified.
EVANGELICAL CONTEMPT FOR THE INDIGENOUS CHRISTIANS OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Let me get something out of the way before the inbox fills up. Nothing that follows represents a softening of any Confession I hold. I subscribe to the Second London Baptist Confession without apology or asterisk. Sola Fide. Sola Scriptura. I am not crossing the Tiber. I am not lighting candles. I have not discovered the beauty of the liturgical calendar or developed a sudden appreciation for the Bishop of Rome. I am, as I have always been, the most protesting Protestant you have ever met. I have spent twenty-plus years in the business of making theological enemies, and despite being retired, have a new job, helping Christians through Insight to Incite make theological enemies.
I spent a decade every Reformation weekend - which by God’s glorious timing, lines up perfectly with elk season - driving into Helena, down off the mountain from hunting camp, and nailing the 95 theses to the Cathedral of St. Helena with an actual hammer and nails. My family doesn’t do Halloween, either. It’s Reformation Day. We still tape 95 Reese’s to the door for trick-or-treaters (no one has ever gotten the joke). I’ve not gone soft.
That said…
When an IDF soldier caves in the face of statue-Jesus with a mallet, in a Christian village, terrorizing the Chrisitans inside that home who would fair better with Hezbollah, and the American evangelical response is to applaud him for his Second Commandment convictions, we have a problem that has nothing to do with ecclesiology and everything to do with whether evangelicals have any actual love for the people of Christ scattered across this earth.
I’m calling them Christians, not in the sense of they could join my church by profession, but in the sense they affirm the creeds of Christianity and profess Christ. It’s not a statement, or a confirmation, about the state of their soul, the chances of their regeneration, or whether or not we share an eternal zipcode.
I don’t vouch for the individual testimony of every Orthodox or Catholic Christian on Earth. That would be absurd. I cannot vouch for the individual testimony of every person sitting in a Reformed Baptist church, either, and I know those people. In fact, I’m going to assume most of the former are lost, and most of the latter are saved, a fair bet if wagering on human souls was a thing. But a friend arguing with me over my defense of Middle Eastern Christians said, “I’ve heard you say, if they’re in the Catholic Church, we assume them lost.” Yes, if we’re talking about taking them into church membership, we had better hear about their born-again conversion at some point and a good explanation for why they haven’t left Rome. But we’re not talking addition to the local body by profession of faith or “membership letter.” We’re talking about who you defend when they’re stringing up Christ-professors. And the answer should be, “all of them.”
I’m not arguing that Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox are justified without Sola Fide. I’m arguing that these are Christ-professors who have chosen, in a world full of options, to identify with the name of Jesus Christ. They worship in His name. They suffer in His name. They are killed in His name. So, they get the Protectorate of the Saints. If being a Christian Nation, or hoping to ever become one, means anything at all, it means these are the people for whom we are to serve as a protectorate, if anyone at all, across the oceans.
The visible church has always contained both wheat and tares. The category of “professing Christian” is a biblical one, not a liberal one. Paul wrote to churches with practically every heresy under the sun, and presumed upon them - Nicolations, Galatian Judaizers, Gnostics et al - to be brethren and addressed them as such until, at such time, they proved otherwise. This doesn’t mean I’m presuming Papists to be born-again Christians. But I’m presuming them to be Christ professing , regardless of whether or not they’re Christ possessing, and that’s good enough for the purposes of protecting their property or homes from being destroyed by Israeli tanks.
I took considerable heat from fellow Protestants for referring to Carrie Prejean Boller as a Christian when she was being dragged through the mud by people who should have known better. Specifically, they took issue with me claiming that she was being persecuted for Christ’s sake, as though only born-again believers can be persecuted for Christ’s sake. But my defense of Boller was not because she claimed my doctrinal Confession. It was because she stood for a Biblical doctrine that’s as true when she says it, as when I do. They attacked her because of a doctrinal position that we share, so sticking up for her isn’t purely selfless. In a way, it’s self-defense, because those same people would come after me too, if I were on their radar.
Some have suggested you could say the same thing about Mormons, and ask where exactly we draw the line. There’s an obvious difference with Mormons, in that the historic creeds have to mean something, and if they don’t mean the basest level of defense in times of persecution, they mean nothing at all. Mormons don’t share those creeds. There are no common doctrinal precepts with us, not really. They’re a polytheistic space cult. But if Mormons are being persecuted for a belief that we share, then they, too, should have an army of Christians with clubs and rocks behind them, ready to put someone’s lights out. None of this is a compromise on the gospel.
Here is what I want you to notice. The evangelical coldness toward persecuted Middle Eastern Christians is not a product of loyalty to the solas. They’re not concerned about their denial of Penal Substitution when they’re dismissing that Eastern Orthodox believers matter. They likely have no idea they don’t believe in Penal Substitution. Heck, they likely have no idea what Penal Substitution is. What you see instead are people whose Christianity is entirely aesthetic - shaped by Elevation Worship, youth pastors dressed like Justin Bieber, blacked-out sanctuary walls in converted shopping centers, smoke machines, and the theological depth of a Carl Lentz Instagram post - pretend they’re suddenly concerned about doctrine, with a Lauren Daigle album in the background and The Shack on the bookshelf.
These people are not unmoved by Eastern Christians because they are standing firm on the five solas. They are unmoved by the persecution of Eastern Christians at the hands of Israel because they pray toward relics or offer prayers to saints, but because they burn incense, wear robes, and chant in languages they don’t recognize. It looks foreign. It looks ancient. It does not look like a praise band. And that foreignness, that aesthetic distance, registers in the evangelical brain as suspicion. Never mind that incense or liturgical vestments make considerably more sense than smoke machines and skinny jeans or cargo shorts. It doesn’t feel like church to them, and so those people don’t feel like their people.
That is not a theological conviction. That is a consumer preference dressed up as discernment. I’ve never seen so many proud Protestants as what I saw defending the bashing of that family’s garden Jesus. Suddenly, everyone was Martin Luther. That’s not conviction. That’s convolusion and cowardice wrapped up in a bow.
I CALL CALVIN TO THE STAND
John Calvin, writing in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book IV, in the middle of a passage in which he identifies the Roman Pontiff as the leader of a wicked and abominable kingdom and places the papacy squarely in the fulfillment of Paul’s prophecy about the Man of Sin, pauses to say this: “While we are unwilling simply to concede the name of Church to the Papists, we do not deny that there are churches among them.” Calvin is not being generous in that quote, but precise. His argument is that God’s covenant, once established, is preserved by its own strength, that even amid Rome’s corruptions, the Lord wondrously preserves some remains of His people. This is not ecumenism. This is Calvin refusing to finish a job he believed only Christ gets to finish, because the wheat-and-tares parable assigns that harvest to One who is not John Calvin, and is certainly not a self-appointed evangelical in the comments section with an opinion about why smashing Jesus statues is okay.
By the way, the Christians in Lebanon are largely not Papists. They are Maronites, the Copts, the Melkites, and the Assyrians. They do not answer to Rome. They have no Pope whose temporal pretensions Calvin spent his career contesting. They affirm the Nicene Creed. They confess Christ crucified and risen. They worship in languages older than Latin, in liturgical forms that predate the corruptions Calvin was fighting by centuries. They are, by any confessionally honest accounting, further from most of the errors Calvin condemned in Rome than Rome itself was, and waaaaay further from the specific errors with which Luther penned his theses (chiefly, the selling of indulgences).
These professing believers are being bombed, displaced, and erased while the evangelical world that prints WWJD lanyards cannot summon the basic human conscience to say that what is being done to them is wrong. In fact, several - about the Jesus-bashing photo - said ‘thanks’ to the IDF soldier. I’m convinced there’s never been a generation of evangelicals as dumb and thoroughly rotten as this one.
When Protestant Christians were being burned under Mary Tudor, when Huguenots were being massacred on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, when the Waldensians were being hunted through the Alps, they were not in a position to produce a systematic theology before being counted as Christians worth defending. They were known by their profession of Christ, the same one being made today by the grandmother in a Maronite village in southern Lebanon who woke up to find soldiers in her street, taking a mallet to her garden Jesus.
If the standard Calvin applied to Rome, the institution he considered the very seat of Antichrist, is more generous than what American evangelicals are applying to the oldest continuous Christian witness on earth, then the problem is not Protestant theology. The problem is that American evangelicals are not actually applying Protestant theology. They are applying garbage theology assembled from End Times charts, foreign policy briefings, and a theological framework that has no confessional warrant, no Reformed precedent, and no basis in the plain teaching of Jesus Christ. Calvin would have defended the Christians of Lebanon, and that’s a fact.
ISRAEL’S WAR ON CHRISTIANS
In just a few years, this is what has happened to the Christians of the Middle East at Israeli hands:
The St. George Melkite Catholic Church in Derdghaya, Lebanon, a congregation that had already survived Israeli strikes in 1978 and again in 1992, was destroyed by another Israeli missile. Eight people sheltering inside were killed. The priest’s house and parish offices were leveled in the same attack.
Pierre Al-Raai, a Catholic priest in the Christian village of Al Qlayaa, refused to abandon his people. Israeli artillery struck his home. As villagers rushed to pull out the wounded, a second strike hit the same location. He died of his wounds.
The Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza, believed to be the third-oldest church in the world, built over the tomb of its fifth-century bishop, standing since the Crusaders rebuilt it in the twelfth century, was struck by an Israeli airstrike while sheltering over 450 displaced civilians. Eighteen were killed. The church was struck again the following year, collapsing two more of its walls.
The Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza, the only Catholic church in the Gaza Strip, was shelled by Israel. Three people inside were killed. The parish priest was wounded.
This is the record and these are the facts. These missile strikes are carried out with the most sophisticated targeting systems known to man, on loan from the United States, and can hit a tennis ball from 10 miles away. None of it is an accident. The fact that they’re striking churches disproportionately during worship is no accident either. But the persecution doesn’t stop there.
The Greater Bethlehem area has been reduced to thirteen percent of its original size through Israeli land expropriation for Jewish-only settlements, displacing Palestinian Christian families whose land deeds run back centuries.
In the Christian village of Taybeh, in the West Bank, Jewish settlers torched the ancient fifth-century Church of St. George Al-Khader, burned a Christian cemetery, and spray-painted threatening graffiti on Palestinian Christian homes.
Israeli settlers attacked the Armenian Convent in the Old City of Jerusalem. Police, stationed one minute away, arrived twenty-five minutes after the attackers had fled. There was no investigation and no charges.
Jewish vandals broke into the Church of the Condemnation in Jerusalem, smashed an olive-wood statue of Jesus, and attempted to set the building on fire. A Muslim guard stopped them.
Thirty Christian graves in the historic Anglican Cemetery on Mount Zion were toppled and desecrated. Israeli authorities would not launch an investigation.
Israeli police blocked roads to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Holy Saturday, preventing Christians from entering their own holiest site for the Holy Fire ceremony.
Israeli municipalities launched property tax collection campaigns against churches in Jerusalem, targeting assets long considered exempt, with church leaders describing the policy in their petition to Prime Minister Netanyahu as “economic harassment designed to shrink the Christian footprint in the city.”
The Jerusalem Municipality froze all bank accounts belonging to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, because of an unpaid tax enacted retroactively for the first time in almost 500 years, locking in approximately $3 million and leaving the ancient institution unable to pay staff, cover utilities, or meet basic operational needs for the schools, hospices, and charitable programs it runs throughout the city.
The Rossing Center for Education and Dialogue documented 111 recorded attacks on Christians in a single year, with physical assault of clergy being the most common category. Spitting on priests and nuns comprises between sixty and eighty percent of all documented incidents. Nearly half of Christians under thirty living in Israel and East Jerusalem are considering emigration because of their mistreatment. Imagine that. Christians have provided a safe space for Jews in the Holy Land, and now Christians in the Holy Land need a safe space from Jews.
THE WRONG TIME FOR DISPUTATION
There is a time for doctrinal controversy and a time to recognize who’s bleeding. Find any polemicist on Earth who’s spent more time over the last 20 years critiquing and challenging and criticizing Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy than me. I wrote a book calling Rod Dreher an idolater about 30 million times (I’m rounding down). And never do mainstream evangelicals care about these debates, not one iota. And that’s what is so stomach-turning about those who dismiss the plight of the Middle East’s indigenous Christians on doctrinal grounds: it was doctrinal grounds they didn’t care about until it was Jews doing the killing. The indigenous Christians of the Middle East - the Maronites, the Copts, the Assyrians, the Greek Orthodox, the Melkites - have kept the name of Jesus alive in the land where He walked for two thousand years. They have survived Rome, Byzantium, the Umayyads, the Crusades, the Ottomans, and the modern secular state.
They might be a potential missions project, sure. They might be a theological curiosity for evangelicals who have no idea that there was a time before End Times charts existed. But they are also the oldest continuous Christian witness on the face of the earth, and they are being erased while American evangelicals debate whether their statues deserve to be smashed.
We have been trained to see the Middle East as a monolithic sea of Arab Muslims, with Israel as the lone outpost of civilization. That is Israeli foreign policy marketed as a biblical worldview, and it has worked spectacularly. There is no room in that mental map for a Lebanese grandmother who has prayed to Christ in Aramaic her entire life. But she exists. Her village exists. And when soldiers roll into it and take a mallet to her garden Jesus, the correct response is not to thank them for their iconoclasm. They are not iconoclasts. They are idolaters who worship the Jewish people collectively.
WE’VE LOST OUR EVER-LOVING MIND
There was a time when Christians did not stand around offering theological footnotes while pagans harassed believers in their own homes. There was a time when a man smashing the image of Christ in a Christian village would not be met with applause from people claiming the name of Christ. There was a time when the instinct was not to explain away the offense, but to confront it. To resist it. To make it clear, in unmistakable terms, that Christ’s people were not a prop to be mocked or a population to be toyed with.
There was a time when Christians didn’t sit around blinking at evil as if it were a weather pattern we couldn’t stop. There was a time when pagan arrogance got answered, not explained. When men didn’t need a panel discussion to decide whether it was bad for enemies of Christ to mock Him openly. When the faith wasn’t something you managed, but was something you built, defended, bled for, and, if necessary, enforced with the kind of conviction that wet your sword.
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We used to produce men who would have looked at a soldier smashing the image of Christ in a Christian village and responded with something other than a carefully worded tweet about the Second Commandment. We used to understand instinctively that there is a difference between tearing down false gods and humiliating the people of God, and we didn’t need a seminary degree to tell the difference.
We used to understand that Christ is King not only in the invisible realm of personal devotion but over nations, laws, and public life. And the Christians who acted like it were dangerous to the enemies of the church. They were, in the best sense of the word, formidable. They were the types of Christians who would smite evil, instead of smile at it.
Now we get invertebrate evangelicals who watch a Jesus statue get beaten with a hammer for Israeli Instagram likes, and reach for a microphone to clarify that, “Technically, the vandal had a point about graven images.” And “AcKSHuaLLy, the First Amendment does support Mosque construction in New Jersey.” And if you want churches built in Texas, “We have to fight for giant monkey god statues in Texas.” At least, that’s Ted Cruz’s perspective. And if a war cult across the ocean harasses Christians in their homes, well, war is hell, after all. What’s a guy to do about that?
Somewhere along the line, we replaced conviction with caveats and called it wisdom. We forgot that the same God who saves sinners also topples nations, and that His people, historically, have lived like they believed both were true. We’re forgetting what it’s like to glorify God by kicking the teeth in of a barbarian. What we are watching now is not the triumph of a more refined Christianity. It is the slow amnesia of a people who have forgotten what it looks like to declare Christ King and act like it. How dare the Israeli military touch the King’s servants.
DEAR ISRAEL
We know what you’re doing. God Almighty knows it, too. The United States government has known what you are for a long time, and has decided at the highest levels that the relationship is worth maintaining anyway. The bombs keep flowing because Raytheon needs the contracts and the contracts need the wars and the wars need the justification and the justification needs the theology, and the theology gets laundered through a thousand pulpits by men who have confused the foreign policy of a Middle Eastern ethnostate with the eschatological program of Almighty God.
The money moves from the defense contractors to the politicians, from the lobbyists to the campaigns, from the think tanks to the talking points, and everybody in the room knows how the room works. We know. You know we know. The whole thing runs on the assumption that American Christians are too thoroughly marinated in dispensational end-times mythology to ever look up from their Scofield notes long enough to notice what is being done in their name and with their tax dollars. That assumption has, until recently, been correct.
You can have the money. You can have the weapons. You can have the diplomatic cover, the UN vetoes, the congressional standing ovations, and the presidents who fly over to perform the goyim humiliation ritual at an ancient landscaping retaining wall. We have looked the other way on things that would have ended any other government’s relationship with Washington before the ink dried on the wire transfer. We have called it complicated (it’s not). We have called it the only democracy in the Middle East (it isn’t). We have called it many things and given many excuses. But we are going to talk about what you are doing to Christians, and it stops now.
But forget America. America is a fading empire run by compromised men with purchased convictions and a foreign policy for sale to the highest bidder. Forget the State Department. Forget the Foreign Relations Subcommittee. Forget the International Criminal Court, where your lawyers will run out the clock for eleven years while you build more settlements. None of that is what you should be afraid of. None of that is what’s coming.
What is coming will ride out of heaven on a white horse, and His eyes will be like a flame of fire, and on His head will be many crowns, and He will be clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which He is called is the Word of God. What is coming has a sharp sword coming from His mouth, and with it He will strike the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron, and He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. What is coming has a name written on His thigh, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, and every king who ever issued an order against the people of Christ will stand before that name and give an account for it.
You took a mallet to the face of Jesus Christ in a Christian village. You bombed the third-oldest church in the world. You killed a priest with a double-tap artillery strike and filmed it to watch back later and laugh. You froze the bank accounts of the oldest Christian institution in Jerusalem. You spat on nuns in the street where He walked to His crucifixion. You desecrated the graves of His people and seized the land of His church and drove His followers from the homes their families have occupied since before your nation existed.
He knows. He has written it down. Every name. Every order. Every soldier who raised his hand, every commander who gave the command, every politician who signed the check, every pastor who blessed the arrangement, and called it prophecy fulfilled. Every single one of them is already in the record, and the record will not get lost, and the case will not get dismissed, and the statute of limitations will not run out, and there is no jurisdiction on earth that can shield you from the verdict.
Your blood will run as high as a horse’s bridle for one thousand six hundred stadia. The Psalmist saw you turned into footstools. Daniel saw the thrones cast down and the Ancient of Days seated, and the books opened, and the court convened and judgment given. John saw every island flee and every mountain fall, and the kings of the earth and the great men and the generals and the rich and the powerful hiding themselves in caves and in the rocks, calling to the mountains to fall on them and hide them from the face of Him who is seated on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb. Because the great day of their wrath had come, and who could stand?
Not you. Not your army. Not your American-funded air force. Not your nuclear arsenal made with stolen uranium. Not your diplomatic relationships and your congressional allies and your lobby organizations and your ten thousand years of accumulated theological argument for why the land belongs to you and the people of Christ in it do not matter.
The man whose image your soldier caved in with a mallet this week is returning. He is not coming back on a donkey. He is not coming back as a baby in a manger for you to reject a second time. He is coming back as the rider on the white horse, with the armies of heaven behind Him, and the wrath of God before Him, and every knee that has not already bowed is going to bow, and every tongue that has not already confessed is going to confess, and every account that has not already been settled is going to be settled in full, with interest, on a timeline of His choosing.
And when He returns, His first course of action will be to evict from Israel every last unbelieving Jew and Muslim from the Earth at the tip of His own blood-drenched sword. He will rule from the throne of David, and take what is rightfully his, and install a Kingdom that your squatter’s rights will see quickly vacated with your permission slip to live on planet Earth.
The Christians of Lebanon, Gaza, and Jerusalem are not abandoned. They are not forgotten. They are not without a Protector. He’s the King you crucified and Messiah you rjected. You should be afraid. Not of America. But of Christ. Because He has a flock in Zion. He’s got sheep of His fold. They’re the ones who worship Him, and call them themselves by His name. He will bless those who bless them. And He will curse those who curse them.
Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him” (Psalm 2:12).
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