Sacred holidays celebrated by the two major Biblical religions, Passover and Easter, take place usually within days of each other in March and April. In the year 2011 they are quite close. The Jewish week-long celebration of Passover began at sundown, Tuesday, April 19th, two days after Christian Palm Sunday. Good Friday takes place on April 22nd and Easter Sunday on April 24th.
The last day of Passover is on April 26th.In other words, in the year 2011, Easter, which celebrates the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, takes place within Passover week, in which the Last Supper and Crucifixion also took place. Passover celebrates the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt and the beginning of their miraculous saga as a nation. The story of that nation is told in the Old Testament, the Five Books of Moses, or what Jews call the Torah.
The New Testament tells the story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, a Jew. It was written by his apostles, or followers, who created the Christian religion, based on the teachings of Jesus Christ. Jesus was a Jew.
Thus, the story of the Jewish people and the story of Christianity are intertwined. The New Testament is wholly dependent on the prophecies in the Old Testament. Without the Old Testament, there cannot be any New Testament. Thus, the Bible consists of both testaments, and that is the Book that has determined the destiny of both the Jews and the Christians. It is also the Book that created the moral and religious foundations of America.
Before the publication of the King James version of the Bible, there were many other versions printed in English and other languages. But the King James version, written in the beauty and poetry of Elizabethan English, the very same language in which the works of Shakespeare are written, became the prevailing translation of Holy Scripture, playing a role among citizens of the American nation, brought to our shores by the English settlers. (With the Douay-Rheims translation from the same era playing a comparable role among Catholic colonists in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.)
And it is well accepted that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States could not have been written by a people not imbued with the teachings of Holy Scripture.Thus, the moral connection between the Jewish people and the Christians who created America is based on a devotion to the Bible and its teachings. The extent of Biblical influence on the American people is profound and will last as long as this nation exists as a sovereign nation and not some entity in a secular, pagan world government.
The rise of paganism in America can be seen in the new, religious-like devotion to environmentalism. In 2011, Earth Day is celebrated on Good Friday. What is Earth Day? Should it also be called Tree-Hugging Day? It is the environmentalist’s holy day of reverence for Mother Earth, a decidedly pagan idea. Of course, the Bible teaches us to be good stewards of the earth’s resources. It teaches us that God gave man dominion over the earth and its resources. After God created Adam and Eve, the Bible says (Genesis 2:28-29):
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.”
In other words, there is no need for a religion-like environmental movement since the Bible admonishes us to be good stewards in our use of the earth’s resources. But what is equally significant is that it was the Christian religion which made the world know of the history of the Jews, God’s Chosen People, an ancient nation that is still alive and vibrant in the ancient land of Israel.
Despite all the persecution that the Jews have suffered throughout history after their exile and dispersion from the Holy Land, they still exist and will continue to exist as long as God wants this living proof of Biblical truth to reign. The covenant between God and His Chosen People is as binding today as the day it was made between God and Abraham. And it was a Jewish Jesus who was sent to this earth by God in order to extend that covenant to all non-Jews who believed in him. Thus, today, both Christians and Jews who believe in Biblical religion are in covenant with God.That both Christians and Jews are being warred against by the Islamists is not surprising in that the Bible writes of Ishmael, who might be called the father of the Arab nation (Genesis 16:12): “And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of his brethren.”
America’s first war was fought against the Islamist pirates on the Barbary coast of North Africa. Americans knew the Bible and knew who they were up against. And it was these same Islamists who hijacked four airliners on September 11, 2001 and destroyed the two towers in Manhattan, crashed into the Pentagon, and killed 3,000 Americans.
The Bible is not only a book of miracles which took place in Biblical times, it prophesies the miracles of today. One of the great miracles of the 20th century is the resurrection of the Jewish nation in the Holy Land. After suffering one of its worst persecutions in history, the Jewish people were able to restore themselves as a nation in Israel. Not only have they restored themselves physically, but they have restored the use of the Hebrew language as the official language of a modern, computer-savvy nation.
Imagine, the ancient language of the Bible now being used everyday by everyone in a modern nation. It boggles the imagination. And yet Israel is again threatened by the descendants of Ishmael, the wild man, and his Iranian brethren who would destroy the Jews.
We are living in Biblical times, for everything in the Old and New Testaments are being re-enacted with uncanny accuracy. The Israelis now have a formidable army, navy, and air force, plus the nuclear bomb, conceived by the genius of a Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein. And as long as the American people adhere to their Biblical religion, they will triumph over their enemies.
That more and more American Christians recognize the importance of this private moral alliance between the people of Israel and the United States is manifested by the formation of Christians United for Israel (CUFI). It was organized in 2006 by the efforts of Pastor John Hagee of the CornerStone Church in San Antonio and is reawakening a recognition of the prophetic writings in Holy Scripture which early Americans were very familiar with. Gary Bauer is its president, and Glenn Beck will be the keynote speaker at CUFI’s Washington Summit on July 19, 2011. Those of us who disagree with the U.S. interventionist foreign policy still applaud the moral alliance between Israelis and Americans.
Recently, I came across an interesting book published in 1850 with the peculiar title of Sketches and Incidents or, A Budget from the Saddlebag of a Superannuated Itinerant, edited by George Peck. In it is a chapter on the Jews, headed by a quote from Psalms: “My covenant will I not break.” The author writes:
No people, whose annals have ever had a record in the history of the world, afford so many anomalous peculiarities as the Jews. Their history is a wonderful record of almighty providences…. And yet this singular and inscrutable course of events, in the national history of the Jews, was described beforehand, in prophecy, with almost the same minuteness with which time itself has developed it….
By Moses it was written, “The Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from one end of the earth even to the other….and thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a by-word, among all nations whither the Lord shall lead thee; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed alway….Yet, for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them to destroy them utterly. I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have driven thee, but I will not make a full end of thee.”
What a literal history written three thousand years before the events, was this of the present conditions of the Jews!
The article ends with these prophetic words written in 1850: “And for what purpose have they been kept a distinct people, but that they may yet be restored to the favor of God, and reinstated in their ancient and holy land? Where is the infidel speculator who can read this lesson of Providence, and dare deny its convincing clearness?”
Restored in 1948 with a Jewish population of about 700,000, the present-day State of Israel has grown into a nation with over 7,000,000 people, six million of whom are Jews. Anyone who can look at the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv and count the number of computer start-ups its young scientists have created and not be awed by this proof of Biblical truth is missing the true sense of history. The 21st century is proving to be an historical period, the meaning of which only the Bible will explain.
