Years ago, I had a distrust of Jewish people and I was pretty indifferent towards the nation of Israel. Today, I am not afraid to say I support the nation of Israel against its enemies as well as defend the Jewish remnant based on their promises given to them by The Lord Jesus Christ.

So what changed? Simply put, when I understood how this story began and how it was going to end, it was pretty easy to pick the right side of history…The same side The Lord has already picked.

God spoke to Abram and attached a warning to the promise. “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” That word did not die, it was repeated to Isaac, then to Jacob, who was named Israel. The same God said He would give Abraham and his seed “all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession,” and He called the covenant itself everlasting.

The later law at Sinai could send that people into exile. It could not, by the wording of the same Scriptures, cancel the oath. Leviticus says that even in the land of their enemies God would not cast them away to destroy them utterly and break His covenant. Jeremiah stakes their continuance as a nation on the sun and the moon. If those ordinances depart, then the seed of Israel shall cease from being a nation. They have not departed.

I will not adopt the fashionable sentence that Israel is theologically finished. The second reason is that the New Testament does not take the sentence back. Paul, a Hebrew of the tribe of Benjamin, opens a chapter with a prayer, not an obituary: “my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved.” He says they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge. I do not support Israel because I think the modern state is righteous, converted, or above criticism.

Romans 10 will not allow that vanity. I support Israel because the same apostle, one chapter later, asks whether God has cast away His people and answers, “God forbid.” Blindness in part has happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. As concerning the gospel they are enemies for the Gentiles’ sakes. As touching the election they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. “For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.”

A church that boasts against those branches is not being deep. It is being the audience Paul warned. “Boast not against the branches.” The olive tree does not become a deed by which Gentiles evict the natural limbs and then call the eviction fulfillment.

People who want that eviction anyway usually come through two doors. The first door is Galatians 3:16. “And to thy seed, which is Christ.” The verse is true. The worldwide blessing promised to Abraham comes through that one Seed, and those who belong to Christ are heirs according to that promise: justification by faith, the Spirit, the gospel preached beforehand to Abraham.

What the verse does not say is that the church is Israel, that Jacob has been renamed, or that Canaan has been reassigned to congregations. Paul even says, in the next breath, that the law four hundred and thirty years later cannot disannul the earlier promise or make it of none effect.

Galatians 3 is a case against salvation by Sinai. It is not a quiet repeal of Genesis 17. The same man who wrote Galatians still called Israel his kinsmen according to the flesh, still listed their covenants and promises, and still said they were not cast away.

The second door is more practical. It says Genesis 12:3 may stand in theory, but the nation on that map is not the Israel of the text. That is not a discovery. It is a maneuver. The land the prophets name is not an allegory. It is Canaan, Judah, Jerusalem, the mount of Olives before the city on the east. The people they name are the house of Israel and the house of Judah, gathered back, often before they are cleansed, for the Lord’s name’s sake.

The New Testament still calls that people Jews and Israel after the cross. Jesus spoke of Jerusalem trodden down of the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. There is no other people on earth who sit in that geography under that name as the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The modern state is not printed as “1948” in Zechariah. It does not have to be. A literal reading does not have a second Israel in the wings. To deny that this nation is that people is, too often, to void the blessing-and-curse clause so the nation can be treated as fair game.

I know what follows that denial. The prophets already wrote it down. “Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.” God says He will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling and a burdensome stone. All that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it. “I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.”

Then the day of the Lord comes, the city is hit, and the Lord’s feet stand on the mount of Olives. Living waters go out from Jerusalem. The Lord is king over all the earth. The residue of the people is not cut off. The city is safely inhabited. The nations that fought her are judged.

That is why I will not stand in the camp that wants the name erased. It is not because Israeli cabinets are holy. It is because Scripture puts the Lord Himself on the other side of that siege. If Satan is building an army of nations to go to war against Israel on the day of that battle, why would I choose to follow those people to battle? How foolish is the man who thinks they can win a war against God?

Joel adds the indictment the modern world prefers not to read: God will plead with the nations for His people Israel, whom they have scattered, and for His land, which they have parted. Matthew 25, at the coming of the Son of man in glory, parts the nations by what they did to the least of His brethren. I will not pretend that passage is only a civics lesson in kindness. In the same discourse Jesus has just spoken of Judea’s flight and of hatred by all nations. How the world handles that people in the crisis is counted as done to the King. In other words, Jesus will take attacks on the Jewish people personally.

I also know who the older enemy is. Satan stood up against Israel. Satan stood at Joshua’s right hand to resist him. The dragon in Revelation persecutes the woman who brought forth the man child. The war against that line is not, first, a news cycle. It is the serpent’s war against the seed. He fights with a lie as much as with an army: deny the Son, and move the everlasting covenant off Isaac. “I will establish my covenant with Isaac.” “In Isaac shall thy seed be called.”

A religious system that denies that Jesus is the Christ, denies that He died as the Scriptures say, and relocates the heir-line to Ishmael is not a cousin of Genesis. It is a rival claim to the same oath. That’s what Islam is. That’s why I refuse to side with Islam in their war against Israel. That is why I can call such a system a weapon in the old hostility without hating the millions caught inside it. “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” has not been repealed. Ishmael was promised princes. He was not promised Isaac’s covenant. The families of the earth are still to be blessed in Abraham’s Seed, which is Christ. None of that requires me to bless a teaching that trains the earth to see Jews in that land as thieves of a stolen promise.

The prophets rebuke Israel more fiercely than her modern critics do. Paul still wants them saved. A nation can be beloved for the fathers’ sakes and wrong in a given law or a given government. What I will not do is join the project that says they are cast off, that the church has taken their name, that the people on that map are a counterfeit, and that Jerusalem is a stone the world is righteous to throw.

I support the nation of Israel because God bound Himself with an oath He called everlasting; because He has not cast away the people He foreknew; because the King is not coming to a renamed metaphor; and because the Bible warns the nations, and the churches among those nations, not to make themselves that people’s enemy in the last days. The sun is still up. The city is still on the map. I will not pretend I cannot read.

Imagine being on the battlefield with all of the nations staring down Jerusalem under the delusion that you are about to destroy Israel once and for all…only for the returning Jesus Christ to come and utterly destroy you for your wickedness.

Couldn’t be me.