Showing posts with label Charles Gardner. Show all posts

Saturday, February 2, 2019

COMMENTARY: Israel's Forgotten Friend in Britain - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

COMMENTARY: Israel's Forgotten Friend in Britain

Friday, February 01, 2019 | Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

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I confess that the article I am about to write was initially intended only to address the important issue of roots – both of Christianity and of Western civilization as a whole.

But I have been somewhat diverted along a different route, which I shall explain. So stay with me as I will eventually return to the roots of my story.

In looking up a verse from Isaiah, where he refers to the “root of Jesse” (one of many prophecies of the coming Messiah, Jesus), I was reminded of the fact that former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson had made much of a text from this passage in support of his Zionist views, spelt out in his book _The Chariot of Israel _and clearly inspired by his strong Christian faith. (I am reliably informed that both Harold and his wife Mary were Bible-believing Congregationalists to which he also owed his brand of Christian socialism).

The text in question, Isaiah 11.11, refers to a second return of Jewish exiles, which trumps the notion that such prophecies were all fulfilled with the return from Babylon so that modern Israel has no right to their ancient land today.

I believe this is very significant in light of the ongoing controversy over rising anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, of which Wilson was a long-time leader and the only occupant of No 10 Downing Street to have won four general elections.

By contrast, current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has openly embraced those who wish to destroy Israel.

Writing for the Jewish Chronicle on the 50th anniversary of Wilson’s first election victory, Robert Philpot dubbed him “the forgotten friend of Israel” who sprang to her aid in 1967 and 1973 and whose first overseas visit after leaving office in 1976 was to Israel, where he received an honorary doctorate and inspected a forest near Nazareth that had been named after him!

In Parliament he described the Jewish state “by any test…the only democracy in [the] region” and his book was described by his Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins as “one of the most strongly Zionist tracts ever written by a non-Jew”.

Tragically, however, his devotion to the cause of Israel contrasts sharply with today’s Labour left from whose ranks he originally hailed.

Which takes me back to my starting point, for the survival of our Judeo-Christian civilization will depend entirely on whether we remain connected to our biblical roots. If we cut ourselves off from our godly heritage, the ‘sap’ that gives us life, direction and purpose will no longer flow, with the result that our culture will wither and die like a tree pulled from the ground.

It’s that time of year when we begin to witness the shoots that produce flowers like snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils pointing the way to another springtime. These beauties come from roots (or bulbs) buried in the ground for many months.

Christianity was the new spring in the purposes of God that emerged from the roots of Judaism. According to St Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians, who had to be reminded that God was not finished with his chosen people, Gentile believers “now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root (of Israel) …You do not support the root, but the root supports you,” he thundered. (Rom 11.17f)

This should encourage us to put our trust squarely in the God of Israel, and his Son, the Jewish Messiah, Jesus, “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David” _(Revelation 5.5), also prophesied by Isaiah as _“the root of Jesse” (Isa 11.10) who will draw the nations (Gentiles) to himself.

In this respect it is also significant that there is a strain of Gentile ‘blood’ in Jesus, through his ancestor Ruth, the Moabitess, King David’s great-grandmother, a wonderful woman of virtue who threw in her lot with her Jewish mother-in-law Naomi.

Still on this theme, Isaiah’s discussion of roots is related to a springtime for the nation of Israel that surely speaks of today with its reference to a second return from exile, this time not just from Babylon but “from the four quarters of the earth” (Isa 11.11f) including “the islands of the sea” considered by some theologians to refer to the British Isles.

This passage also speaks of a coming millennial age of perfect peace when _“the wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together…” _(Isa 11.6)

Something of a preview of this beautiful picture was sent to me by a friend the other day. It was a photo of an elephant crossing a road with a lioness and her cub, using its curled up trunk to protect the baby lion from the scorching heat. (Ed. note: The veracity of the photo is currently being disputed.)

“They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isa 11.9)

As for Israel, the Lord speaks emphatically of final restoration through the prophet Amos, concluding with the words: “I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted…”(Amos 9.15)

Charles Gardner is author of Israel the Chosen, available from Amazon; Peace in Jerusalem, available from olivepresspublisher.com; and A Nation Reborn, available from Christian Publications International

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Sunday, January 27, 2019

The Holocaust Remains a Wake-Up Call for the Church - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

The Holocaust Remains a Wake-Up Call for the Church

Sunday, January 27, 2019 | Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

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Anti-Semitism

Nearly three-quarters of a century has passed since the Red Army liberated the notorious Auschwitz death camp on January 27, 1945, a date now marked by the annual Holocaust Memorial Day here in Britain and elsewhere.

It is held with the intention of ensuring that it never happens again. But alas, anti-Semitism is back to haunt us, proving the point often made that we never learn from history.

In the UK, we face the dreadful possibility of having a Prime Minister with strong anti-Israel sympathies if the party currently holding onto power by the skin of its teeth does not get its act together.

In the US, they have witnessed the ghastly spectre of a congresswoman who took “swearing in” quite literally as she launched a profanity-laced tirade against President Trump on taking office.

Democrat Rashida Tlaib and Representative Ilhan Omar are the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, with the latter having already expressed her opposition to Israel.

Anti-Semitism has also been cited among issues affecting the Women’s March movement in America. In fact, it is on the rise worldwide, with left and right forming an unholy alliance against God’s chosen people.

On the other hand, there is increasing support for Israel from unexpected quarters. Take Brazil, for instance. Its new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has boldly declared his intention of following the US lead in moving his embassy to Jerusalem. And Wilson Witzel actually requested the sound of a shofar to accompany his inauguration as a Brazilian state governor, so strong is his support for the Jewish state.

So what does this mean? Nations, communities and individuals are lining up for battle (whether knowingly or not) in anticipation, no doubt, of the day of judgment when the sheep are separated from the goats (see Ezekiel 34.17, Matthew 25.31-46, Joel 3.2) on the basis of how they treated the Jewish people.

In the midst of all this, the silence from most leaders of the Christian church has been deafening – just as it was in Germany and elsewhere during the Shoah. I guess this is largely because of the dangerous and heretical Replacement Theology that has certainly swept through much of the British church.

We should be witnessing stirring calls from our pulpits to stand with the Jews, but somehow they don’t see the connection. That’s because they have been disconnected from the roots of their faith, and have forgotten that we worship the God of Israel, who has sent his Son as Messiah, first for the Jews and also for the Gentiles.

We owe them everything – the Law, the Prophets, the Patriarchs, the entire Bible (Luke being the only Gentile author) and most of all Jesus, who will soon return as the Lion of the tribe of Judah (Rev 5.5).

That the Jewish state is once more under severe threat was illustrated by the surface-to-surface missile fired into Israel by Syrian-based Iranian forces on Sunday. Fortunately, it was successfully intercepted.

Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of the late evangelist Billy Graham, is currently suffering severe side-effects from cancer treatment which she believes could be a message for Israel.

Recalling that God had some of his prophets live out the message he gave them, she wonders if her current life and death battle relates to the Jewish nation, reborn just a week before she came into the world.

“The warning I feel deep within is that Israel is in danger of a surprise attack in this, her 70th year,” she writes, urging them to return to the Lord (Joel 2.12-14) and us Gentiles to pray for the peace of Jerusalem “and for the whole House of Israel”.

If we truly love Jesus, we will love the Jews – as many of our Arab friends testify on finding peace and reconciliation at the cross. Wake up, church!

PHOTO: Visitors seen at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum in Jerusalem ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)

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Saturday, January 26, 2019

Jewish Evangelist Who Preached Yeshua During the Holocaust - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

Jewish Evangelist Who Preached Yeshua During the Holocaust

Friday, January 25, 2019 | Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

Topics:

Messianic Jews

With the annual Holocaust Memorial Day in view, it is worth being reminded not only of how many perished, but also of those who escaped the jaws of Nazism – often miraculously.

It is a little known fact that in spite of terrible persecution in Eastern Europe, thousands of Jewish people were very open to the message of Jesus. In fact, research is currently being undertaken on the so-called ‘Messianic’ believers who died in the Shoah.

Among those who experienced miraculous deliverance from the death camps was Jakob Jocz, a Lithuanian-born third generation follower of Yeshua who became an evangelist to the Jews of Poland under the auspices of CMJ (the Church’s Ministry among Jewish people), a British-based international society already reaping a plentiful harvest of souls throughout Europe and North Africa by the 1930s.

Such was the response to their work that the Warsaw branch CMJ chief Martin Parsons expressed the need for over 700 staff rather than the mere ten suggested at the time.

Jocz was sent to Birkenhead, near Liverpool, to train for Anglican ordination, and when he returned to Poland, he wrote: “In spite of anti-Semitism and increasing hatred, the Jews met us in many places with an open mind and with great readiness to hear the gospel.”

He added: “Today when the cross is being twisted into a swastika…Jewish men and women flock into the mission halls to hear and to learn about the wonderful Saviour.”

In May 1939, he received an urgent call to England to replace the main speaker of the Church Missionary Society’s annual summer conference, who was unavailable due to illness.

In a recent research paper The Rev Dr Jakob Jocz, Dr Theresa Newell writes: “This was indeed a miraculous deliverance as members of his family died at the hands of the Nazis soon afterwards…” Jakob’s father Bazyli was betrayed to the Gestapo and shot to death.

The family’s story has something of a Fiddler on the Roof ring to it. Jakob’s grandfather, Johanan Don, was the local milkman in his shtetl (village) who first encountered the good news of Jesus when seeking medical help for his teenage daughter Hannah (Jakob’s mother) who had been crippled in a fall.

The doctor was a Jewish believer and gave Johanan a Hebrew New Testament. He subsequently became a disciple, but died soon afterwards.

In order to make ends meet, his widow Sarah took in a boarder, a young rabbinic student named Bazyli Jocz. When he read Isaiah 53, he asked his teacher, ‘Who is the prophet speaking about?’ It was of course a situation very reminiscent of the Ethiopian eunuch’s conversion in the Book of Acts (chapter 8). But the teacher was no evangelist, instead hitting him over the head and calling him a ‘detestable Gentile’ for asking such a ‘foolish’ question.

Bazyli was shocked, but undeterred, and after consulting the same doctor who had pointed Johanan in the right direction, he too became a believer.

He duly married Hannah, and Jakob was born in 1906. He became a noted evangelist and theologian whose writings represent a rich legacy of inspiration and encouragement for Christians – all called to preach the gospel to Jews.

As the Third Reich stormed across Europe, he wrote a booklet appealing to churches to speak out against the persecution of his people. As an Anglican bishop pointed out in the foreword, “he rightly calls attention to apathy in the church on the subject of missionary effort amongst the Jews.”

Indeed, he challenged the church to become ‘missional’ as its raison d’etre and to remember the call in that mission is “to the Jew first” (Romans 1.16).

If the church has no gospel for the Jews, he believed, it has no gospel for the world. He had total confidence in the authority of Scripture and stood on the premise that “loyalty to Jesus Christ is the ultimate test of the disciple,” adding: “Commitment to Jesus Christ makes universalism (the idea that all roads lead to God) impossible.”

He was highly critical of Rabbinic Judaism, lamenting that “making Torah into a religion robbed it of life” and saying that the removal of the sacrificial system (following the destruction of the Temple in AD 70) without their acceptance of the “once and for all times sacrifice” of Jesus led Judaism to a preoccupation with the study of the law. The irony of this, of course, is that the law was anchored in the fact that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin”. (Leviticus 17.11)

One of his theses was that the early church was much closer to the Old Testament than Rabbinic Judaism is today. And he advocated Jewish believers to fulfill the prophetic call to take the gospel to all nations.

Jakob certainly practiced what he preached. It is estimated that, through outreach efforts like his, there were as many as 100,000 Jewish believers in Yeshua by the time war broke out in 1939, many of whom would no doubt have shared the fate of their brethren in the concentration camps but who would also no doubt have shared the life-giving gospel of their Saviour.

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

COMMENTARY: What Do Abortion and Antisemitism Have in Common? - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

COMMENTARY: What Do Abortion and Antisemitism Have in Common?

Monday, January 14, 2019 | Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

Topics:

Global

As London-based newspapers noted with horror that the new year had been marred by yet more fatal stabbings, it was another statistic that really shocked me. And it’s one that points to what lies behind the eruption of violence on our capital city’s streets.

While we remain obsessed with focusing on the symptoms, rather than the causes, of our problems, we will get no closer to a solution.

Knife crime has risen to frightening levels which have left London’s streets apparently now more dangerous than those of New York, long notorious for its gang warfare.

But this shocking dilemma is met only with cries for more police, and more funding for law enforcement generally.

And yet in the midst of this comes news that abortion remains the biggest cause of death by far in our blood-soaked world. Whereas 8.2 million people died from cancer in 2018, almost 42 million abortions were recorded. In other words, for every 33 live births, ten infants were aborted.

The connection is obvious: violence breeds violence. We slaughter babies in the womb by the millions – legally in most cases – and wonder why violence on an unprecedented scale has erupted on our streets. And I am aware that there are other, often related, factors such as broken homes causing lost and unloved young men to seek ‘family’ elsewhere.

At a time when there is a major focus on research into killer diseases – and there has undoubtedly been much success with discovering new cures for cancer – anti-abortion fundraisers would more likely be harangued or beaten up than receive open public support.

And yet the Bible says: “Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘But we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it?” (Proverbs 24:11-12)

While every victim of senseless knife crime is a tragic statistic, the mass slaughter of innocents that goes by the euphemistic name of ‘choice’ for women whose lifestyle is unsuited to raising children, is a blot on Western civilization in general, and British society in particular.

After all, there was a time when we led the way with missionary zeal in proclaiming the efficacy of a Judeo-Christian culture based on the Ten Commandments, one of which states with the utmost clarity: “You shall not murder.” (Exodus 20.13)

But as soon as we jettisoned our commitment to those values, many of the nations we have influenced followed suit.

Our only hope as a nation is in returning to the God-given laws Moses was given on Mt Sinai – laws that Christ subsequently enabled us to follow through his Spirit in our hearts.

The slaughter of innocents is essentially a mark of rebellion against God – and the devil himself is behind it.

In anticipation of the birth of Moses, the Egyptian pharaoh tried to prevent God’s will from being fulfilled by murdering every male Jewish infant (Exodus 1.22). Moses was a ‘type’ of the Messiah to come in that he led God’s people out of slavery towards new life in the Promised Land. Jesus went further by redeeming all who trust him from slavery to sin.

But when Christ arrived on the scene some 1,500 years after Moses, King Herod ordered the slaughter in Bethlehem of every child under the age of two. (Matthew 2.16)

In both cases, God was about to usher in a wonderful new era – and Satan tried to stop it.

In more recent times, when six million Jews were mercilessly slaughtered in the concentration camps of Germany and Poland, one-and-a-half million children were among them.

Once again, God was about to introduce a glorious new epoch for Israel, with Jews back in their ancient land and many recognising Jesus as Messiah. Satan tried to stop it in an unspeakably monstrous way. Yet, even so, he failed in his ultimate objective, but at a terrible cost of precious lives because so few who were in a position to do so lifted a finger to help.

It’s interesting that the legalisation of abortion in Britain in 1967 happened to coincide with a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the old established churches. Whenever God wants to do something special in revealing his presence and power to sinful humanity, Satan seeks to spoil his plan.

Ultimately, however, the devil is doomed to defeat and will take all his allies with him into the pit of everlasting fire known as hell. (See Rev 20.7-10)

St Paul writes: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” (Romans 16.20)

My new year message to abortionists, and all who support them, is: Stop this Satanic slaughter!

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Sunday, January 6, 2019

COMMENTARY: Europe's Migrant Crisis & the Jews - Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

COMMENTARY: Europe's Migrant Crisis & the Jews

Sunday, January 06, 2019 | Charles Gardner ISRAEL TODAY

Topics:

Christians

Among the incidents reported over a Christmas period during which I was largely preoccupied with the death of my dear mum were the illegal immigrant crisis and the potential disaster of a rogue drone that brought Gatwick Airport to a standstill.

And there is a poignant connection between the two that has an important message for Britain in the new year.

Jews trying to escape the gas chambers were once prevented by the British from entering their own fatherland, a nation that has now come to our rescue by providing the technology used to ground the unmanned flying machine.

Before, during and immediately after World War II, British soldiers were ordered to deal with ‘illegal immigrants’ to Israel, and the grossly insensitive way in which they handled it still reverberates in the hearts of those who experienced it and their descendants.

The greatest injustice of that tardy episode in our history was the fact that Britain had been charged by the League of Nations to prepare the Holy Land for re-settlement by Jews who had been scattered and persecuted among the nations for almost 2,000 years.

It was thus an obvious refuge for Jews desperately trying to flee Nazi-occupied Europe. But in order to appease the region’s Arab population, who used violence and intimidation to discourage Jewish repatriation, we disgracefully limited the quota of immigrants.

Although we had recognised, finally, that you couldn’t negotiate with fanatical dictators like Hitler, we failed to apply the same lesson to our dealings with the Arabs of the Middle East.

The story of one particular family, as told by Aliza Ramati in Where are you my child?(published by Zaccmedia), is especially harrowing and helps to bring the current migrant crisis into perspective. Theirs was a case of jumping from the frying pan into the fire – escaping from the Fuhrer’s claws only to be crunched by the jaws of the British lion.

After fleeing Czechoslovakia in November 1940, they eventually joined 1,800 refugees boarding a rickety old ship designed to carry only 300 people.

Because they didn’t have the necessary papers, the crew were reluctant to press on with any haste for fear of incurring the wrath of the authorities themselves, so the desperate passengers kept bribing them with jewellery and other gifts. But the journey was perilous, with much sickness and death. And when, after some months, they finally caught sight of Haifa, they were surrounded by the British navy who treated them like dogs before re-routing them to detention camps in the faraway Indian Ocean island of Mauritius as well as in Atlit, near Haifa.

Some were transferred to a bigger ship, the SS Patria, which was subsequently blown up and sunk with the loss of 250 lives.

The Haganah, an underground Jewish movement fighting the British, planted a bomb on the vessel with the apparent intention of only disabling it in order to prevent the deportation of its passengers, but the plan went horribly wrong.

As a result, the family at the centre of this true story got separated in the chaos following the explosion – husband from wife, and wife from baby, feared drowned. Another described swimming to safety through a sea of blood. But a Viennese man had saved the child, who was reunited with his mother some time later.

The family somehow survived their ordeals to realise their dream of settling in Israel, though it took a circuitous route via Mauritius where, with the help of the Czech consulate in South Africa, the storyteller’s grandfather enlisted as a Czech soldier fighting the Germans and was eventually posted to Israel, where he deserted in order to join the Haganah.

His wife, however, was treated with compassion by one British officer, who paid for it with imprisonment and who wrote: “I joined the British army with the intention of fighting the Nazis… To my sorrow, I was not sent to the battlefield, as I had hoped. Instead, I was sent here to assist in taking care of the Jewish illegal immigrants… I’m a soldier, and I must obey orders, but I am doing everything I can in order not to lose my humanity…”

The book is the product of a school ‘Roots’ project undertaken by 13-year-old Roni, who successfully traced the tortuous and heroic path of her ancestors with the aid of cassette recordings of her great-grandparents.

Family tree searches have become quite fashionable – and that’s a good thing as knowledge of our roots helps us appreciate the positive influences of past generations.

In the same way, it is vitally important and hugely enriching for Christians to explore the Judaic roots of their faith, which adds clarity and insight to the great truths of Scripture which, of course, came to us through the Jewish people and patriarchs.

A better understanding of our roots might well have prevented much of the persecution suffered by Jews at the hands of ‘Christian’ Europe.

Western civilization itself is based on the framework of biblical teaching perfectly reflected in Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, and if we cut ourselves off from its influence, we will lose the sap that gives us life, light, wisdom and compassion – and will wither and die as a tree does when cut off from its roots (see Romans 11.17f).

The future of our civilization depends on remaining connected to these roots. Those who oppose Israel need to understand that we cannot do without them. Even the technology that brought down the drone at Gatwick was developed in Israel, whose expertise in dealing with terror is proving beneficial to all.

As for the Iranian and other migrants risking their lives trying to cross the channel, there is a need for compassion, mixed with wisdom.

Above all, we must not repeat the shameful response of the British to the Jews trying to escape the gas chambers.

Jesus famously said: “Do to others what you would have them do to you” – the so-called ‘golden rule’ – “for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7.12)

PHOTO: A scene at the Atlit detention camp, complete with barbed wire, conveys something of the brutal way the British treated those fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. (Charles Gardner)

Contents List

Saturday, February 2, 2019