RETURN TO THE GOD OF ISRAEL

Martin M. van Brauman

The Scriptures are an open-ended, intellectual search for truth, righteousness and justice concerning the human condition and for dialogue with God.  Jewish ethics and Divine truth have permeated Western thought for over 2,000 years through Christianity.  For the Jewish people, the purpose of the history of Israel in the Scriptures is to build a nation in exile and to maintain its peoplehood and repeatedly bringing it back to the Land after each exile to demonstrate redemption.  The mission of the Jewish people is to sanctify the Name of God in the world and to spread it throughout humanity.  The peoples [nations] will acknowledge You, O God; the people [nations] will acknowledge You – all of them. Psalms 67:4.

During the years of exile, the Jewish nationhood and resistance to assimilation into foreign cultures and foreign gods were maintained because the Jewish people had faith in the redemption back to the Land and that through them God would bless all the families of the earth.  The Scriptures command You shall walk in His Ways. Deuteronomy 28:9.  God said of Abraham I have loved him because he will instruct his children and his household after him that they keep the way of God, to do righteousness and justice. Genesis 18:19.

The recognition of Israel by the United Nations, followed by the victories of the War of Independence in 1948, the 1967 War and the 1973 War, was God knocking at the door of the world and inviting Israel to enter into Redemption.  Behold, I am with you; I will guard you wherever you go, and I will return you to this soil; for I will not forsake you . .  Genesis 28:15.

The radical “intellectual” left find it intolerable the success of Israel as a thriving Western-style democracy and high-tech economy in an ocean of brutal Arab dictatorships that produce tyrants, regression, ethnic conflicts, religious hatred and genocide.  The radical left cannot tolerate the Jews becoming the sovereign masters of their own fate and Jewish national self-determination after Jewish exile for 2,000 years of powerlessness.

. . . although they see, they do not see, and although they hear, they do not hear, and they do not understand . . . Matthew 13:13.

God gave the Jewish people three promises: (1) the seed of Abraham will never disappear, (2) the Jews will eventually return to Israel (Leviticus 26:42, 44, 45) and (3) all of the nations of the world will ultimately learn from the Jews the ideal of ethical monotheism and world peace (Isaiah 2, Micah 4).