Controversy of Zion

All the world’s heavy artillery seems to be trained on the tiny nation of Israel. Zechariah’s prognostication that Jerusalem would be a “cup of trembling” was never more appropriate than in our time. Israel represents less than one percent of the landmass of the entire Middle East, yet commands a lion’s share of the world’s attention.
What curious phenomenon is it that promotes such bias and slanted reporting in the secular and even much of the religious press when it comes to discussion of Israel and the Jewish people? What is going on in our world? What produces the great controversy of Zion? Is the controversy of Zion an apocalyptic sign or merely a bothersome thorn in the flesh of humanity?
In a day when strange “new wave theologies” are sweeping through the churches, a clarion call to biblical truth comes as needed illumination of the timeless truths of Scripture. Indeed, those who are carelessly embracing theological anti-semitism in the form of the doctrine of replacement, indicating that since the church has taken the place of Israel that God has no more purpose for the Jewish people, will find a strong challenge in the pages of Israel & Christians Today to re-assess some of these digressions from Scripture being publicly proclaimed in high places in the church world.

The concept of Zion is first and foremost Biblical, not a political, concept. Most simply defined, it is the idea that God who owns the whole earth can sovereignty grant any portion of it to whomsoever He wills. He has given the land of Israel to the descendants of Jacob for all of time. The Jewish people have returned to the land of their fathers as a direct fulfillment of God’s will and Word: first the physical return, the national restoration, and then the full spiritual recovery in the messianic age (Ezekiel 36-39). That the Bible is absolutely unerring in its accuracy should be a comfort to the Christian who claims the Bible as his text for all of life’s issues.
If the modern day children of Israel, after the Holocaust, have returned to the land with a certain bitterness of spirit, even hardness of heart and even unbelief (and this is certainly true of only a portion of the populace of the land), this should not come as any surprise to the student of God’s Word – for that is exactly the way the prophets said it would be.
Both Jesus Christ and the apostle Paul link the destiny of the Christian Church to that of Israel. The history of the Jewish people is consequently part and parcel of the Church’s doctrine and the key to its theology. Born in the land of Israel, forged in the Temple compound and developed in the synagogues of the Roman Empire, the Church of Jesus of Nazareth marches side by side with the Synagogue throughout the centuries. At the end of this long march, as at its beginning, it encounters on this Jewish soil the children of Israel who have returned from the midst of the nations, and are facing Zion, facing the Mount of Olives whose tremendous messianic and eschatological significance we know.

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