Sermon Tone Analysis

Podcast on The Messianic Jewish Expositor.

In the previous message about The Promised Land Covenant We just a little bit talked about Replacement Theology.

So, Why are some people against the Jews?

We often hear that people are against the Jews because they haven’t been properly educated, so the answer is more education.

If that were the case surely the problem would have been cured long ago at least in some locations.

But that has not occurred.

Antisemitism is found all over the world.

No, the cause is much deeper than lack of education.

My friends, it has to do with the Messiah.

When the Messiah returns certain things are going to happen.

bad things for the enemy of our souls, Satan.

He will be finished.

The Book of Revelation talks about this in detail.

Now Yeshua, Jesus, the Messiah is Jewish.

He has a very strong connection to the Jewish people and they have a role in His return.

Let me tell you something.

If Jesus was not Jewish there would be no Jew hatred.

If Jesus was Italian we’d be dealing with hatred of Italy and hatred of people descended from Italians both in Italy and in every other country where Italian people and their descendants dwell, instead of Jew hatred because the return of Messiah would be dependent on Italian people.

By the way, I don’t know why I chose to use Italian people in this example.

Maybe it’s because I care for Italian people and knew many of them growing up in New York and then later on in Boston and in Pittsburgh.

In fact without the friendship in college of Joe, an Italian American man who helped me through some tough times I might never have become a doctor.

And another Joe, also a close friend and an Italian American, was the minister who performed the ceremony when Suzanne and I got married.

But the example would work with any nationality.

Jesus however is not any nationality.

He is Jewish and came from Israel.

Why?

I don’t know exactly.

It’s what God decided.

But your response to all this, to what I’m telling you, should be “Can you prove this Art?

Because that sounds like utter nonsense to me”.

I believe that I can prove it.

And, if you believe my proof, what does that mean for you, my Jewish brothers and sisters?

Is what I am about to tell you going to drive you toward Yeshua, your Messiah, or is it going to drive you away?

You see, what I am telling you is absolutely outrageous.

I am telling you that anti-Semitism or Jew hatred is an indirect proof that Jesus is the Messiah, because Jesus, Yeshua, is a Jew and when He returns Satan is done for.

If the Jewish Nation can be annihilated - not one single Jew remaining alive - then the Messiah will not return.

That is what Satan wants of course and he’s been working on it for many centuries!

And as the season of Yeshua’s return draws closer Satan is ramping up his efforts much more aggressively.

Does this make sense to you folks?

In fact I hope you will soon see that it is the only explanation that makes any sense, any sense at all.

At this point I’d like to talk with you about definition of terms.

Technically anti-Semitism means against Semites and Semites are the descendants of Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, and from Shem came not only the Jews but also other descendants of Abraham including Arabs.

Anti-Semitism does not normally mean anti-Arab.

So a better term would probably be anti-Judaism.

But Judaism is the practice of a religion and anti- Semitism describes hostility or hatred of Jewish people whether they practice the religion of Judaism or not.

Hitler, for e.g., didn’t care if a Jew practiced Judaism or not.

To the Nazi’s a person was a Jew if he or she was a physical descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and having one Jewish grandparent was enough to count that person Jewish.

Such a person was to be eliminated, killed.

In fact Hitler’s goal was to eliminate or annihilate the entire Jewish race.

And as we shall see there have been others in the past who also wanted to annihilate the Jewish race.

So what shall we call hostility toward the Jews with the desire to annihilate them?

I believe that we can call those who hate the Jews, Jew Haters and we can call the practice Jew Hatred.

And what about those who say they have no problem with the Jews at all, that it’s just Israel they hate?

If the Messiah was Italian, these people would say “We love Italian people.

We just hate the country of Italy and want to annihilate it”.

Now does that make any sense?

Of course not.

Such people are either badly confused and don’t understand what they’re saying or they are charlatans and deceivers.

Israel is a nation not just a land.

Israel is made up of the Jewish people, all of the Jewish people, whether they live in the land of Israel or not.

That’s how God sees it.

If you hate Israel you’re a Jew Hater plain and simple.

Now before we go further, we need to know three things:

FIRST: What is the evidence for Jew Hatred?

Is there such a thing?

Has Jew Hatred always been around?

Is it widespread?

Was it around before there was any significant return of Jews to The Promised Land, even before the modern State of Israel was founded in 1948?

Didn’t there have to be Jew Hatred in order for the Holocaust to have occurred?

Are there people and even governments today that deny that the Holocaust ever occurred?

I’m going to do my best to show you that the answers to all of these questions is yes.

SECOND: The second thing we need to know is the reason for Jew Hatred.

THIRD: And the third thing we need to know is this: is there a cure for Jew Hatred?

I’ve already said that education alone is not the cure.

So, is there a cure?

So, first, what is the evidence for Jew hatred?

I’m going to give you a relatively short answer because I believe that anyone with an open mind can see that antisemitism or Jew Hatred is real.

We have many examples in the Bible:

We have Pharoah attempting to kill all male Hebrew children at birth.

Exodus 1:15-17

We have the attempt of Haman in the Book of Esther attempting to annihilate all Jews.

We have Antiochus Epiphanes in Daniel 8 and in the Book of Maccabees in the Apocrypha attempting to expunge Judaism.

In post Biblical times we have the Spanish Inquisition attempting to annihilate all Jewry by either forcing Jews to give up their religion and all Jewish practices or killing those who would not obey this order.

And we have Hitler’s Final Solution in which Hitler tried to annihilate the Jewish race in Europe and had he succeeded I’m sure he would not have stopped until no Jew would be left on planet earth.

Now I certainly haven’t documented for you every major instance of antisemitism in history; there are many many more that could be mentioned.

But rather I’ve selected those instances in which either the annihilation of the Jewish race or the annihilation of the Jewish religion or both was clearly in the mind of the perpetrators and there is a particular reason for this.

We’ve already touched on the reason but we need to talk more about it and we’ll do that now.

To see what the root cause of Jew Hatred is we need to look at a particular Bible verse.

A very foundational Bible verse.

Let me read it to you:

The Lord, God, is speaking in this verse.

He is addressing the Serpent and talking about the consequences of something that had just happened in the Garden of Eden involving our first parents, Adam and Eve.

God told Adam that he could eat the fruit of any tree in the Garden except the fruit of The Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil.

And God warned Adam that if he ate of that fruit he would die, he would surely die, and he would die that very day.

This instruction, this dire warning, was given to Adam even before God created Eve.

But by extension through Adam, the first man and the head of the human race, this warning was also for Eve.

The Serpent through deception tricked Eve and she ate of the forbidden fruit and gave some to Adam and he also ate of it.

What happened immediately following this is known as The Fall.

The Fall is a profoundly important event that led to catastrophic consequences, both physical and spiritual for each and every one of us, and these consequences began immediately.

The biggest consequence was death but it wasn’t the only consequence.