Standing in support of Israel, Jews, and believers in all the nations, in the name of Jesus (Yeshua). Sharing biblical truth, encouragement, news and prophecy.
"Herein is our love made
perfect, that we may have boldness in the Day of Judgment: because as he is, so
are we in this world.There
is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear: because fear has
torment." 1 John 4:17,18
These verses were in my ‘Daily Light on
the Daily Path’ devotional for today. The well-known part of this passage
is ‘…perfect love casts out fear’. But I am moved this morning by the full text
and its implications.
John is telling us that our love, made perfect,
full and complete; puts us in a position that we do not need to fear the day of
judgement. The day is coming when Y’shua will separate the sheep from the
goats. The fire will be ready to put our life’s works in and see what survives
as gold. BUT there is assurance before Him- I AM HIS. Yes- I will have much of
my life’s deeds go up in smoke. There will be much I will regret. But I,
because of HIS great love and atoning sacrifice- may have boldness in that day.
The confidence that rests not in works of righteousness that I have done- BUT
by HIS mercy I stand. His manifest Grace. His unbounded Love.
I was confirmed in the Lutheran Church at age
13. My pastor - E.E. Bosserman - was a rather formidable man.
A handsome, retired navy Chaplin, he carried himself a bit removed and rather
regally. We loved and respected him and slightly feared him. We knew he loved
us and his way of showing us was to make sure we knew our Catechism. He taught
us well. He taught us Truth. I remember many of his Saturday morning
confirmation lessons but the one from Revelation has always stuck with me.
He read to us:
"Now I saw
heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. And He who sat on
him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and
makes war. His
eyes were like a flame of fire, and on His head were many
crowns. He hada name written that no one
knew except Himself. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood,
and His name is called The Word of God." Rev. 19:11-13
I was enthralled with this
powerful, awesome and fierce image of my Savior. I was inexplicably attracted
and drawn to Him. I understood that He was coming in Judgment but the words the
Pastor read made my heart swell and I felt… peace… and love.
My best friend at the time
almost fainted! She fell on the floor sobbing in fear. She became quite
hysterical. Poor Pastor Bosserman was quite beside himself to know what to do.
He immediately dismissed us and called her mother.
I absolutely could not
understand her reaction. It was like we had seen two different things. I
realize now, in one way we had. Even at that age, I was called to be His. The
love of the LORD was being made perfect in me. His sweet draw on my young heart
was undeniable. It would still be 5 more difficult years before I surrendered
completely to Him, but I will always have engraved in my heart that moment when
I knew His great love.
Judgement day- No I am not
afraid. I do not approach it with any pride or arrogance. I will fall on my
face when I see Him because He is mighty and awesome and a consuming fire. And
that fire will consume anything in me that is not Him. I embrace that time and
fervently await the King’s coming.
Shalom!
Hadassah
Aug. 30, 2017
Nissim & Hadassah
Jerusalem, Israel
Hadassah and Nissim, her accountant husband, live in a settlement just outside Jerusalem with their dog Molly. After making Aliyah (immigrating) from the U.S. with their five children in 1989, they are now semi-retired and open their home to guests and those wishing to make Aliyah. When not busy with their 16 'GrandWonders', they enjoy a quiet life of study, prayer and learning to serve the LORD.
“Behold, God is mighty, yet He despiseth not any; He is mighty in strength of understanding.” Job 36:5 (The Israel Bible™)
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), the largest Lutheran denomination in the U.S., passed two Israel-related resolutions earlier this month at its triennial assembly in New Orleans, La. One resolution established an “investment screen” that will recommend where Lutherans should invest their money with regard to Israel and the Palestinians. The other urged a cutoff of U.S. aid to Israel unless Israel meets a series of conditions and calls for the immediate U.S. recognition of “the state of Palestine.”
Dexter Van Zile, a Catholic pro-Israel activist, who monitors and analyzes the Christian media for the Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) said, “the Lutheran Church has an outrageous obsession with Israel.” He told JNS.org the group “has been beating up on Israel for a long time, and this is just the latest example.”
ELCA logo
David Brog, of Christians United for Israel, said in a statement that the resolutions “blame Israel and only Israel for the conflict in the Middle East. Such one-sided scapegoating of the Jewish state will only fuel further Palestinian rejection and violence.”
Lutheran student activist Austin Reid told JNS.org the church’s resolutions “send a message of discrimination against Israel and neglect to hold the Palestinian leadership accountable for misguiding the Palestinian people.” Reid is an Emerson Fellow at StandWithUs and attends the ELCA-affiliated Capital University in Ohio.
Other observers are more hopeful.
The church setting up an “investment screen,” rather than directly calling for a boycott of Israeli products, is a positive development, according to Emily Soloff, the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) associate director of Interreligious and Intergroup relations.
Soloff, who attended the Lutheran conference, called the resolutions “problematic” and come across as one-sided. But, she emphasized, the assembly did not adopt the explicitly pro-BDS language which was proposed by a number of individual church synods, or branches.
Rabbi David Sandmel, director of interfaith affairs for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), conducted a workshop on Lutheran-Jewish relations at the New Orleans conference. He said he was “not thrilled” by the resolutions, but whether the investment screen will lead to divestment “depends on how [it] is structured, and that is not spelled out.” He added that the Jewish community “should not leap to conclusions while the jury is still out.”
Will “screen” lead to divestment?
Some Israel advocates are pessimistic about the “investment screen.”
“[It] is just a step away from boycotting,” CAMERA’s Van Zile said. “The Lutherans seem to be doing something similar to what the Presbyterians did a few years ago. First, they set up criteria that would disqualify Israel from investments. Then they declared they can’t invest in Israel because it doesn’t meet the criteria.”
An investment screen translates to divestment from Israel, according to the website, Exposing the ELCA, run by Conservative Lutheran dissidents.
“This resolution will be used by the ELCA to divest from Israel and select companies that do business with Israel.”
They go further. The resolution says the investment screen must develop “human rights social criteria,” which will determine where the church’s social-purpose funds should be invested. This is based on concerns raised in an official Lutheran church report.
ELCA members vote at the triennial assembly in New Orleans, La. held Aug. 8-13. (ELCA)
The report, called the ELCA Middle East Strategy is a 2005 church document that recommended “making consumer decisions that favor support to those in greatest need, e.g. Palestinian providers as distinct from Israel settlers on Palestinian territory.”
The document accused Israel of fostering an “environment of oppression,” and claimed that Israel’s security fence “poses an imminent threat to the future of the church in the Holy Land.” The document also complained about the “destructive effect” of Israeli policies on “the ability of Palestinians to marry and raise families.”
The marriage and families reference could lay the groundwork for falsely accusing Israel of “genocide,” according to some experts. Article two of the definition of genocide adopted by the United Nations in 1948 includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within [a targeted] group.”
The language choice raises the danger that the Lutheran church “may falsely allege, or at least imply, that Israel is guilty of genocide,” Prof. Elihu Richter, director of the Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention, told JNS.org. That allegation could then be used as a basis for denying U.S. aid to Israel and justifying a Lutheran boycott of Israeli companies or products.
Ignoring Palestinian abuses
The second ELCA resolution calls on the Obama administration to present a plan for establishing an “independent” and “viable” Palestinian state, with a “shared Jerusalem” as its capital. The Lutherans also urge the president to extend diplomatic recognition to the “state of Palestine” immediately, rather than wait for the issue to be negotiated between the parties, as the U.S. and Israel prefer.
On U.S. aid to Israel, the resolution asserts the U.S. should halt all military and financial assistance unless Israel agrees to “comply with internationally recognized human rights standards as specified in existing U.S. law, stop settlement building and the expansion of existing settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, end its occupation of Palestinian territory, and enable an independent Palestinian state.”
Pro-Israel activists see those terms as blatantly one-sided. Former Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, writing in Newsweek, called the ELCA “a church in decline but one whose enthusiasm for attacks on Israel never wanes.” He noted when the Lutherans refer to construction in eastern Jerusalem, they are referring to “just construction by Jews,” with no mention of Palestinian construction in the city. Likewise, the resolution targets U.S. aid to Israel, but ignores U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority, which is approximately $500 million annually.
The church’s reference to “human rights standards” likewise reflects a double standard, Abrams writes. “These requirements apply to one single country: Israel. In a world awash in repression and human rights violations, only Israel.”
In its latest annual report on global human rights, the U.S. State Department found that the Palestinian Authority carries out “arbitrary arrests based on political affiliation,” engages in “torture and abuse” of prisoners, “restricts freedom of speech and press…through harassment, intimidation and arrest, discriminates against women,” accuses victims of sexual harassment of “provoking men’s harassing behavior,” and “rarely punishes perpetrators of family violence.”
In the Lutheran resolutions, there was no mention of the PA’s behavior.
The ADL’s Rabbi Sandmel said Palestinian human rights violations were “not mentioned” either by the delegates, who attended his workshop, nor the Lutheran church professionals with whom he spoke individually. It would have been “helpful” and “more balanced” if the Lutherans “showed as much interest in Palestinian violations as they do in Israeli violations,” he added.
Soloff, of the AJC Committee, told JNS.org that she did not hear any delegates discussing Palestinian human rights violations during the sessions she attended. She believes “there was a consciousness of Palestinian corruption” that was not articulated. Soloff said the failure to acknowledge the PA’s human rights abuses was “disappointing,” but “in the larger picture, the ELCA did demonstrate a much more nuanced and balanced approach between Israel and the Palestinians than some other mainline Protestant churches have done.”
Pro-Palestinian activists pleased
Supporters of the resolutions see the ELCA’s positions as consistent with the pro-BDS stance of other churches. The group, Isaiah 58, a Lutheran faction that lobbied for the resolutions, issued a statement declaring, “the ELCA adds its own voice and approach to the growing number of U.S. churches that have endorsed economic acts of conscience in support of Palestinian freedom and human rights.”
The group hailed the “investment screen” resolution as “an important step to ensure that we are not profiting from” Israel’s “nearly half-century-old military occupation of Palestinian lands,” according to a prepared statement.
Similarly, The Electronic Intifada, a leading pro-Palestinian website, praised the resolutions as “a massive shift” demonstrating “the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has become the latest U.S. denomination to take economic action against the Israeli occupation.” In 2013 at the previous ELCA assembly, 70 percent of the delegates voted against an “investment screen” resolution, the website pointed out.
Text of the 1994 “Declaration of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America to the Jewish Community,” in which the Lutheran Church repudiated Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic writings. (Screenshot from ELCA.org)
Meanwhile, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., the United Church of Christ, and the Quakers have all endorsed divesting from Israel. The Episcopal Church has rejected divestment, while the Mennonite Church has delayed a decision until 2017. The United Methodist Church’s pension fund dropped five Israeli banks from its investment portfolio in January. However, in May, the Methodists’ national conference voted to reject BDS.
Future of Lutheran-Jewish relations
The ADL’s Rabbi Sandmel is focused on what he sees as indications that “there is opportunity for conversation [with Lutheran leaders] about some of these issues.” He said “for someone like me, who has pretty close relationships with these folks, it’s important to recognize it’s not just the text of the resolutions that matter, but also their broader context and how the dynamics within the church will affect future contacts between church leaders and the Jewish community.”
Some activists are skeptical about those relationships.
CAMERA’s Van Zile said, “Some Jewish leaders are reluctant to criticize the Lutherans, because they want to maintain good relations with their few remaining allies within the denomination. But nobody should be fooled. The anti-Israel activists within the Lutheran Church have been in the driver’s seat for a long time.”
Still, Sandmel said he’s encouraged that in the background material for the Israel-Palestinian resolutions, the ELCA acknowledged that “some Jewish leaders have interceded with the U.S. government, some directly with the government of Israel” in connection with “the critical funding for the ministries of Augusta Victoria Hospital,” a Lutheran-sponsored medical center in east Jerusalem.
The hospital was in danger of closing in 2014 because the Palestinian Authority refused to pay the more than $25 million that was owed in unpaid bills for treatment of Palestinians whom the PA sent there. ELCA officials successfully lobbied the Obama administration and the European Union to pay the PA’s bill.
It has not been previously reported that Jewish leaders were involved in that lobbying effort, nor have those leaders or their organizations been identified.
The ELCA cited the episode as evidence of the benefits resulting from having the church “serve as a place where the concerns of Palestinian Lutherans and the concerns of American Jews have been in conversation.”
“And Hashem thy God will put all these curses upon thine enemies, and on them that hate thee, that persecuted thee.” Deuteronomy 30:7 (The Israel Bible™)
The Evangelical Lutheran Church (ELCA) has overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling on the American government to halt all aid to Israel if the building of “settlements” continues in Judea and Samaria. It also demands that Israel “end its occupation” and recognize a Palestinian state.
The resolution, which passed at an extremely wide margin of 751-162 at a triannual assembly in New Orleans, stated that the United States must end all financial and military aid to Israel if Israel does not “stop settlement building and the expansion of existing settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, end its occupation of Palestinian territory, and enable an independent Palestinian state.”
Maale Adumim, Israel’s largest “settlement.” (Photo: ChameleonsEye / Shutterstock.com)
The church also called on the American president to recognize the “State of Palestine” and refrain from “prevent[ing] the application of the State of Palestine for full membership in the United Nations.”
It passed a separate resolution giving a nod to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, calling for “a human rights-based investment screen for its social responsibility fund”, which essentially meant divestment from Israel and “positive investment in Palestine and other under-resourced areas where human rights abuses materially impact the well-being of all people.”
The ELCA claims about four million members in 10,000 congregations throughout the country.
The resolutions were sponsored by an anti-Israel group within the church called Isaiah 58, which said its goal was to “ensure the church is not profiting from human rights abuses, including Israel’s nearly half-century-old military occupation of Palestinian lands.”
Isaiah 58 released a press release praising the move and claiming that the Lutheran church “has long opposed Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise and supported nonviolent action in support of Palestinian rights.”
The statement also bragged of being in league with other anti-Israel churches, saying the ELCA was joining “the growing number of US churches that have endorsed economic acts of conscience in support of Palestinian freedom and human rights, including the United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, and others.”
In fact, though the United Methodist Church is indeed known for its Israel divestment, in May the church voted down four pro-BDS resolutions.
The actions of anti-Israel churches have received strong pushback from other Christian groups and ministries in the US. The Southern Baptist Church passed a pro-Israel resolution in June which condemned BDS and stated strongly that the church “supports the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign state.”
Pastor John Hagee, the head of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), has called anti-Israel Christians “misguided.”
“Yes, our Christian values demand that we have compassion for those that suffer. But if you blame Palestinian suffering on Israel then you’re ignorant about this conflict,” he told Breaking Israel News in July.
