PENnED

It’s early on a gray Saturday morning, and before the sun even decided what kind of day it wanted to be, something dawned on me with startling clarity:

Some Christians’ adoration of the modern State of Israel has drifted into something almost obscene.

Not because love for a people is wrong.
Not because the Hebrew Scriptures are irrelevant.

Not because the land has no history or holiness.

But because what I’m seeing in certain corners of the Christian world is not love — it’s a distortion. A confusion of covenant with nationalism, of biblical Israel with a modern nation‑state, of eschatology with ideology. And in that confusion, something precious is being lost.

Paul Would Not Recognize This Theology

The Apostle Paul spent his entire ministry insisting that Christ fulfilled the sacrificial system, that Gentiles were not bound to Israel’s ritual laws, and that the people of God were now defined by the Spirit rather than by ethnicity or geography. He wrote with urgency about the tearing down of the dividing wall of hostility.

Yet today, some Christians are reaching back toward rituals and sacrificial language as if Christ’s own sacrifice were not enough. Others speak of the modern State of Israel as though it were a direct continuation of biblical Israel — a theological shortcut that Paul himself would have challenged with every breath in his body.

When devotion to a nation becomes a kind of liturgy, discernment dims.
And when discernment dims, violence can be excused as righteousness.

The Obscenity Is Not in Loving Israel — It’s in Losing the Gospel

What troubles me most is not political disagreement. Christians have always wrestled with how to interpret world events. What troubles me is when allegiance to a nation‑state becomes so absolute that:

• justice is no longer asked for
• the suffering of neighbors is dismissed
• violence is applauded as divine mandate
• and the cross becomes a political mascot rather than a revelation of God’s self‑giving love

When Christians cheer for harm done to others — any others — something has gone terribly wrong. The gospel is not a permission slip for cruelty.

A Call Back to the Heart of the Faith

This is not a call to abandon Israel, nor to deny its history, nor to ignore the complexity of the region. It is a call to remember that Christian faith is not built on nationalism, prophecy charts, or political alliances.

It is built on Christ.
On the One who ended sacrifice by offering himself.
On the One who taught us that every neighbor’s blood is sacred.
On the One who broke down dividing walls, not reinforced them.

If our theology leads us to celebrate violence, we have misunderstood the very heart of the gospel.

A Gray Morning, a Clearer Faith

Maybe it’s fitting that this realization arrived on a gray morning. Gray is where clarity often begins — not in the bright certainties of ideology, but in the quiet ache of conscience.

My hope is simple:
That Christians would return to the gospel that formed us.
That we would refuse to baptize any nation’s violence.
That we would remember Paul’s insistence that Christ is enough.
And that our love — for Israel, for Palestinians, for every neighbor — would be shaped not by fear or prophecy or politics, but by the crucified and risen Christ.

May we return, again and again, to the Christ who breaks down walls, heals our vision, and teaches us to love every neighbor as sacred.