Day: October 28, 2023

ISRAEL IN PROPHECY PART II

On By Geri UngureanIn Brother Bill, Uncategorized

By William Oldham

Looking at mankind in general and Israel in particular, here is something to consider. God has laid out three dispensations for the fulfillment of His plans for man. The first is this present age which began with the creation, and which will come to a close at the Day of the Lord. The second will be the 1000 year reign of Christ here on earth. The third will be the never-ending eternal ages, complete with a new heaven and earth, and New Jerusalem. There are prophecies for Israel concerning all three of these ages.

It is vital in looking at Israel in prophecy, that when the Lord is speaking to Israel, He is speaking specifically to the literal nation of Israel. He is not speaking to the church of Christ. There has been a very erroneous and harmful teaching that declares that when Israel rejected Christ, God rejected them forever, and the church has replaced them; nothing could be further from the truth. A simple reading of the prophets, the words of Christ, and the apostle Paul absolutely refute that false teaching.

Then we must understand that the word of the Lord is to be taken literal when the meaning is clear that it is meant to be taken literally. The birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ vividly demonstrates how God spoke forth literal prophecies through the Old Testament prophets.

Just a few examples: Jesus would be born of a virgin; He would be born in Bethlehem Ephrathah (there were two Bethlehems at the time). Jesus would be despised and rejected by His own people; He would be betrayed by His close companion; they would gamble for His clothes; Jesus would be led like a lamb to the slaughter. And a most telling one in the Lord’s own words, “…They pierced My hands and My feet; I can count all My bones. They look and stare at Me.” Psalm 22:16 Those words were written in the first person, past tense, 1000 years before Christ was crucified.

The Old Testament contains many prophecies concerning Israel and their future. I’m going to begin with Ezekiel, chapters 34-39. Keep in mind that the prophetic word to Israel was the Lord God speaking to a nation of people He had chosen and set His love on. He had chastised them sorely, and disciplined them much for their disobedience, but revealed His heart towards them when He spoke these words to them: “…I know the thoughts that I think towards you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11

The Lord God’s purpose is made clear in His prophecies: He is going to fully restore the fortunes of Israel, and in doing so, the nations will see that He is the Sovereign Lord God Almighty, and will do as He pleases. The Lord says this many times in the book of Ezekiel. The Lord is very specific in chapters 34-39 as to what He is going to do in the future for Israel. Those chapters are divided up into four divisions, and that is how, with the Lord’s help, I will try to lay them out.                                                                                                                                                                                       The Lord speaks to the worthless shepherds of Israel, and tells them what He intends to do with them. And then declares how He Himself will step in to care for His sheep. The Lord speaks to the land, and promises to so restore it that when people pass by they will say, “This land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden.” Ezekiel 36:35

The Lord promises the people (notice the “I wills”), “I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land, Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” Ezekiel 36:24-26

Finally, the Lord speaks to Israel’s enemies, “…You shall fall upon the mountains of Israel, you and all your troops and the peoples who are with you; I will give you to the birds of prey of every sort and to the beasts of the field to be devoured. You shall fall on the open field; for I have spoken,” says the Lord God. Ezekiel 39:4-5

The Lord willing, Part III will come next week.

Brother Bill is a Bible teacher and can be contacted at bboldham@sbcglobal.net

Oh, So THAT’s Who Funded the Pro-Hamas ‘Insurrectionists’ on Capitol Hill

On By Geri UngureanIn EVIL SOROS, Uncategorized2 Comments

WELL, WHO ELSE? THE BOOGEYMAN HIMSELF!

AND DON’T YOU DARE PLAY THE ‘ANTI-SEMITE’ CARD BECAUSE I’M JEWISH!

From townhall.com

Pull back the curtain, and you’ll invariably find that all roads lead to Soros.

We were told by the language police that any and all criticism of Democrat mega-donor George Soros, a Jewish-born Holocaust survivor and champion of left-wing causes, is inherently “anti-Semitic” and fuels the conspiratorial trope that Jews control society.

What is anti-Semitic, though: the 21st-century robber baron’s so-called philanthropy is financing (to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars) anti-Israel activism aimed at delegitimizing the Jewish state—and with it, the expungement of its people.

Wednesday’s storming of a congressional building situated on the U.S. Capitol complex, where a mob of allegedly violent Hamas sympathizers infiltrated the Cannon House Office Building rotunda, resulting in multiple arrests for assaulting police officers, was organized by two Soros-backed, nominally “Jewish” non-profits: the radical Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and far-left agitator IfNotNow.

Jewish Voice for Peace
Through Soros’s philanthropic work, JVP was awarded several grants totaling $650,000 that bankrolled its “human rights” campaign and “social welfare activities” in the Middle East, according to a grant database maintained by the Soros-funded Open Society Foundations, the central hub of the financier’s anti-capitalist, redistributionist network. The Soros-branded Open Society Policy Center Inc. — once the second-largest spender on federal lobbying after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — donated $150,000 and $200,000 in 2021 and 2019, respectively, to the Jewish Voice for Peace Action Incorporated, JVP’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3). And, in 2017, Soros’s primary grant-giving vehicle, the Foundation to Promote Open Society, gifted JVP $300,000.

Jewish Voice for Peace grants | Source: Open Society Foundations website

As Spencer points out, like its Orwellian title, JVP does not act in good faith. The Jewish-in-name-only JVP is not Jewish, nor is it peace-seeking; JVP is as opportunistically “Jew-ish” as George Santos and as peaceful as the fiery Black Lives Matter protests.

“Deploying its ‘Jewish’ identity in attacking Israel is JVP’s métier, one might say its purpose. The cutting edge of this work […] is to deflect accusations of anti-Semitism…” Commentary contributor Joshua Muravchik explains in a deep-dive on JVP’s duplicitous nature. “Were it not for the strategic advantage of speaking ‘as Jews,’ it is likely that some of the self-described ‘progressive and leftist’ activists who constitute JVP’s membership would have little interest in belonging to a Jewish organization.” Indeed, some JVP’s members are not Jews. Rather, it’s a collection of radical-left ideologues “who realize that their lineage affords special leverage in attacking Israel,” Muravchik puts it. “Nowhere does JVP evince any genuine interest in Judaism or in the well-being of the Jewish people or any reverence for the accouterments of Jewish life — holidays, prayers, ceremonial garments, Hebrew words — that it appropriates as props or adornments in its impassioned campaign for Palestinian vanquishment of Israel.”

On its old FAQ page, prior to revisions, JVP acknowledged, “No you don’t” “have to be Jewish to join.” Simply, JVP is “inspired by Jewish values and traditions.”

“JVP misappropriates Jewish tradition by adapting Jewish rites and texts to fit its extreme political message,” Honest Reporting illuminates. Still, self-identifying as the “Jewish wing” of the “Palestinian solidarity movement,” JVP purports to represent “a mainstream” consortium of Jews, and so it seems to the untrained eye. However, JVP supports boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to undermine Israel’s legitimacy, explicitly desiring to drive “a wedge” within the American Jewish community to cause division, generate polarization, and weaken U.S. support — economic, military, and political — for Israel. JVP’s executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson admitted to the tactic at a 2013 Stanford University forum: “So, I think that the more and more we can sort of put that wedge in, saying the Jewish community’s not agreeing on these issues, the more we’ll make progress.”

The organization launched a “Return the Birthright” crusade to dissuade Jewish youth from participating in Birthright, which offers free first-time heritage trips for students of Jewish heritage around the world to trek to Israel. In March 2022, JVP railed against Israel’s policies concerning refugees who sought refuge from Russia’s war on Ukraine, claiming that “Israel is giving Jewish Ukrainians citizenship not out of kindness and generosity, but rather to cement a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine.”

JVP’s board has officially adopted the declaration: “We unequivocally oppose Zionism…” Well, what does it mean to oppose Zionism? It means opposition to Israel’s existence, specifically its existence as a Jewish state a.k.a. Israel’s abolition. Striking an Ibram X. Kendi-esque tone, JVP campus coordinator Ben Lorber equated “anti-Zionism” with “anti-racism, plain and simple. So if you don’t support anti-Zionist causes[,] then you are enabling racism.” JVP deputy director Cecile Surasky took it a step further in a 2015 blog post, arguing that “settler colonialism and white supremacy is [sic] the right, holistic frame with which to understand Israel” and that Israel’s “mythical national narrative” makes “ethnic cleansing, even genocide…divinely justified.”

JVP at-large posits that Zionism is fundamentally racist. In 2016, JVP convened a panel, entitled “The Toxic Stew: Zionism, Antisemitism, and White Supremacy.” One of the speakers asserted that Zionism “means white supremacy.” Another claimed there’s a “real and conceptual connection between Zionism and American white supremacy and Jim Crow white supremacy.”

Accordingly, JVP has established a Network Against Islamophobia (NAI) as a major project. NAI offers workshops and modules committed to “Challenging Islamophobia and Anti-Black Racism.” JVP’s project has commissioned the creation of merchandise, selling apparel like T-shirts, hoodies, onesies, aprons, boxers, baseball caps, tote bags, keychains, and dog jackets, which are emblazoned with bumper-sticker slogans, such as “Stop Profiling Muslims,” “Standing with Muslims Against Islamophobia and Racism,” “Free Palestine,” and “Property of Allah,” an eyebrow-raising sweatshirt decal for a group professing to be Jewish.Even the leftist Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has denounced JVP as a political actor “Increasing Anti-Israel Radicalism.”

JVP’s insistence that commentary critical of Israel cannot be anti-Semitic “gives cover to anti-Semites who couch their malice toward Jews as mere anti-Zionism,” ADL assesses. When it comes to the scourge of Jewish hatred, JVP oft-spreads anti-Semitic canards. Last year, JVP featured on its Instagram account a political cartoon by Bahraini artist Sara Qaed that conjured “anti-Jewish blood libel of the Middle Ages.” The crude illustration depicts Israel Defense Forces soldiers drinking blood to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day, raising blood-filled glasses in a toast as the bodies of Palestinians are strewn across the blood-soaked ground. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum encylopedia definition, the term “blood libel” refers to ritual-murder imagery falsely claiming that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish victims, usually Christian children, for ritualistic purposes. Nazis historically employed the anti-Semitic propaganda to demonize, dehumanize, and persecute Jews.
JVP leadership has also publicly justified terrorism against Israelis. “The problem is that if you just stop the violence, you would not have justice,” proclaimed JVP Board of Directors member Phyllis Bennis at a Students for Justice in Palestine event. After Hamas terrorists massacred more than 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7, prominent JVP activist Ariel Koren expressed that Hamas’s brutality was consistent with “Palestinians’ right to resist.” Koren had co-authored an op-ed for The Guardian, whereas the piece wasn’t allowed to be published without the writers characterizing the Hamas attack as “brutal,” a characterization Koren didn’t agree with. “Western media is HYPERFIXATED on Hamas,” Koren posted on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter.

At its 2017 national conference, JVP “honored” convicted Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted for her involvement in a bombing of an Israeli supermarket that killed two Hebrew University students.



In a letter to the editor addresed to The Forward, which serves a Jewish American audience, Vilkomerson defended why JVP invited Odeh to speak at its bi-annual membership meeting. “We are proud to host Rasmea Odeh as one of many speakers from whom we can learn from about grassroots leadership in struggles for justice in these very difficult days,” the JVP head penned.
In a since-deleted 2020 tweet, JVP shamelessly celebrated the 33rd anniversary of the First Intifada, a violent Palestinian uprising against the Jewish state when hundreds of Israelis, mostly civilians, were murdered. JVP tweeted a poster that contained the chant “L’Chaim Intifada” at the bottom of the flyer, signaling “Long Live the Intifada,” a call for Israel’s destruction.
During the Knife Intifada (2015 – 2016), which saw Israeli civilians, including many children, being stabbed in the streets on nearly a daily basis, JVP encouraged and lauded the “Palestinian popular resistance” led by assailants and murderers, hailing them on social media as “A new generation of Palestinians […] marching on the footsteps of previous generations, rising up en masse…”

In 2019, JVP stood by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a member of the derisively dubbed “Hamas Caucus” and “Jihad Squad,” with the hashtag “#IStandWithIlhan” amid uproar over the congresswoman’s 2012 tweet, in which Omar wrote: “Israel has hypnotized the world.” Omar’s antisemitic comment culminated in the passage of a U.S. House resolution condemning “religious hatred.”



For “a limited time only,” new JVP members were given a free special-issue tote bag with Omar’s face imprinted on it.

Also in 2019, JVP’s political and advocacy arm Jewish Vote for Peace, hosted “Shabbat in the Park” with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), whom the organization praised as a “hero for justice,” after the lawmaker refused to travel to Israel, opting to grandstand instead of visiting her own elderly grandmother despite being granted permission by Jerusalem on humanitarian grounds. Tlaib was offered the exception as long as she would not promote boycotts against Israel during the PR stunt masked as a family trip.

Establishment media outlets like CNN have bought into the charade, mislabeling JVPers as “peace activists” who are rallying against violence being committed “in our name.” In a video explainer on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Washington Post, citing JVP as its supposedly credible source, relied on an interview with JVP’s political director Beth Miller to provide analysis and contextual perspective. Miller previously worked for Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCI-P), which has well-documented ties to the terrorist group PFLP and itself has been designated a “terror organization” by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, because it “constitutes an inseparable arm” of the PFLP and operates “on behalf of” the Popular Front.

IfNotNow
As for IfNotNow, Soros’s grant-making Foundation to Promote Open Society handed $200,000 in 2019 and another $200,000 in 2021 to the 501(c)(3) IfNotNow Education Fund for growing membership, visibility, and impact around “general support” to end Israeli “occupation in the Middle East” (meaning the eradication of Israel), Open Society Foundations grant recordsshow.
IfNotNow grants | Source: Open Society Foundations website
Similarly, IfNotNow claims to be an “American Jewish establishment,” also co-opting Jewish rituals, but it’s a fringe movement focused on antagonizing real Jewish organizations by staging sit-down demonstrations outside major U.S. Jewish institutions nationwide while, at the same time, it refuses to engage in dialogue with Jewish leaders to actually discuss the issues at hand.

Along with an ambivalent attitude toward the threat of terrorism targeting Israeli citizens, IfNotNow has a history of blurring the line between terrorist and civilian fatalities, plus providing a platform for terrorists and the terror-minded (via Honest Reporting):
In both 2014 and 2021, INN held public readings of the Kaddish mourner’s prayer for Israelis and Palestinians killed during Israeli counter-terror operations in Gaza. However, listed among the names of those whom they were mourning were members of the internationally recognized terror groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Similarly, in May 2019, INN responded to a tweet about five Palestinians killed during an Israeli operation to counter a rise in Gazan rocket attacks, saying that it was “heartbreaking.” Among those Palestinians listed in the tweet was Mohammad Nseir, a member of the small Islamist group Kataeb Humat al-Aqsa’s rocket-launching unit.
[…]
As part of its education initiative, INN released its “Liberation Syllabus,” providing a list of books from both Palestinian and Israeli writers for integration into Jewish education systems.
One of these recommended books was authored by Ghassan Kanafani, a spokesperson for the internationally recognized PFLP terror organization.

INN has also teamed up with American Muslims for Palestine, a Chicago-based organization that endorses anti-Israeli violence and terrorism as legitimate forms of “resistance.”
IfNotNow’s Detroit chapter reportedly shared an event graphic containing an image of a paraglider, a reference to the armed Hamas terrorists using the aircraft to paraglide across the Gaza Strip border and mass murder hundreds of attendees at an Israeli music festival. Executed on the spot, droves of innocent victims were gunned down in fields, ditches, roads, and portable toilets attempting to flee the open-air Tribe of Nova rave near Gaza. 260 bodies were initially found on the site of the Oct. 7 massacre.

Back in 2019, IfNotNow was also a participant in the #StandwithIlhan efforts.
SOURCE

This is a Spiritual War:

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour” (1 Peter 5: 8).

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).

MARANATHA!!