Day 38 — Israel in Crisis

The most precise prophetic view into Yeshua’s future activities in the days following His hostile takeover of Planet Earth (Zech. 14:1-4) can be found in Matthew 25—what some people erroneously call “The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.” It is not a parable but a prophecy.

• When: When the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him.

• Where: He will sit on His glorious throne—which will be in Jerusalem, as that is where he returns. (Zechariah 14:3).

• Who’s invited: The survivors from the nations (Zech. 14:16).

Yesterday, I referred to a Jewish man who was beaten to death with a megaphone. That is what I had read: "According to a statement by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and a police report, the man, Paul Kessler, 69, was struck in the head with a megaphone held by one of the protesters and died of his wounds on Monday" (Times of Israel). Now, police are saying, "What exactly transpired prior to Mr. Kessler falling backward isn't crystal clear right now." Some witnesses say he died from hitting his head on the concrete when he fell back after he was struck. As we reported, it was recorded as a homicide, and the police have not ruled out calling it a hate crime. (I'm not sure what else they could call it.)

When the Hebrew Bible uses the word “nations” (ethnos in Greek and goyim in Hebrew), it excludes Israel. So, when God refers to the “nations,” it means all the nations besides His nation, Israel. See Psalm 2: “Why do the nations rage?” They rage over Israel. So clearly, Israel is not one of the nations that are raging. Why is this important? You will see in a minute.

Remember, Yeshua has come back in answer to the cries of His people (just like when God sent Moses). The nations have attacked Israel: “I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it” (Zechariah 14:2). When the Greek New Testament quotes the Hebrew Old Testament (such as with Matthew 4:15 quoting Isaiah 9:1, “The land of Zebulun, and the land of Nephthali, by way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles”), it use ethnos for the non-Jewish nations (Gentiles). My point: the nations that are gathered as sheep and goats do not include Israel. Why? Israel has just experienced national salvation and conversion to life in Yeshua, as it says in Zechariah 12:10, 13:1, and Romans 11:26: “All Israel shall be saved.”

Yeshua has just returned in answer to the cries of Israel to defend her. “Then the Lord will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights on a day of battle” (Zech. 14:3). He wins, obviously. Zechariah 14:16 speaks of the “survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem.” They must come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles. So, the survivors that Zechariah speaks of, from the nations who have attacked the Jewish nation, now come to Jerusalem. This is the same gathering of which Yeshua speaks in Matthew 25.

So, let’s set the scene:

1. Jerusalem is attacked (Zechariah 14:1-2).

2. The Jews cry out (Zechariah 12:10, Matthew 23:39).

3. Yeshua responds and comes to fight as a Man of War (Zechariah 14:3-4, Revelation 19:11ff).

4. He takes over as King of Jerusalem, the new world capital (Zechariah 14:9), vanquishing the false messiah that God calls the beast (Revelation 19:20).

5. On the Feast of Tabernacles, He demands that the nations come to Jerusalem to worship Him (Zechariah 14:16). It could be simply delegations of people, as Jerusalem can’t fit that many people, or God has some other supernatural plan.

6. The Jewish survivors, who have now confessed Yeshua as Lord (Romans 11:26, Zechariah 12:10, 13:1), are present, and so are the nations.

7. Next, the nations are judged.

We Love the Poor—This is not about the Poor

Now, this is where most people get this wrong. They have turned this prophecy about Israel and the nations into a sweet story about helping the misfortunate among us. Please don’t get me wrong; a large part of what we do in our ministry is helping the poor and hurting. There is a biblical case that can easily be made that helping the hurting and providing for the poor is a large part of the mandate of the body of believers. However, that is not the meaning of this passage.

He separates the people like sheep and goats. I have heard many teachers speak of sheep nations and goat nations. But that is not what Yeshua said. Yes, He does gather the nations, but then it says He separates the people individually—not the nations. It is interesting that sheep and goats in Israel would often graze together during the day, but at night the shepherds (Yeshua) would separate them because the goats required a warmer place of shelter. I won’t go so far with the analogy between warmer and eternal punishment but it does speak to the end of the age as nighttime, when sheep and goats will be separated.

He separated individuals from the nations to the right and the left. The right hand is always considered to be the place of greater honor than the left. This is why Joseph was confused when his father, Jacob, put his right hand on the secondborn, Ephraim, and not the firstborn, Manasseh. Jacob explains that Ephraim would be greater. Moses placed blood on the right ears, thumbs, and toes of the priest.

Next, Yeshua tells the righteous that they are blessed because of the good works they did to the least of Yeshua’s brothers. One commentary, ignoring the context completely, said this is about strong Christians blessing weaker Christians—the brothers of Yeshua. Again, I remind you,

• They are in Jerusalem.

• The nations have attacked Israel.

• Yeshua fights against them, and now He judges them based on how they treated the least of His brothers.

• Everyone standing before Yeshua is an unbeliever. The believers have already received their glorified bodies and will rule and reign with Him.

• Zechariah speaks of this gathering between the Lord and the nations.

The Great Revelation

Joseph saved the whole world, but it was to his brothers that he revealed himself in the end. Yeshua is enjoying sweet fellowship at this moment with Jewish people who finally, in the last minutes, recognized Him as Messiah, crying out, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Matthew 23:39) Now, He asks the people of each nation, how did you treat my brothers?

Did You?

Did you embrace the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement that sought to destroy Israel economically? Did you embrace anti-Semitic conspiracy theories? The Republican National Convention a few years back had to scrap one of their speakers only hours before she was to share. Mary Ann Mendoza was speaking because a drunk-driving illegal immigrant killed her son. On the very day, she was to speak, she retweeted crazy conspiracy theories about Jews and retweeted an endorsement of one of the most demonic and destructive pieces of literature ever to be written, that blames all the world’s woes on the Jews, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The book is quite popular in Muslim-majority countries and even in Europe.

You name a problem, and I can find you a few million in the Muslim world that will prove it was the Jews' fault. But as we are seeing today, it’s not just the Muslims. It’s Harvard and Columbia. It’s Black Lives Matter. On October 10th, three days after the massacre, they glorified Hamas in a tweet, with an image of a paraglider. One of the ways that Hamas infiltrated Israel was on paragliders... In other words, this had nothing to do with Israel's response. They were commending those who cut off the breasts of women, gouged out the eyes of men, and burned people alive.

I posted a few videos on Instagram, and my phone buzzes all day long with antisemitic tropes. I've never experienced anything like this.

The popularity of The Protocols in the Arab world is not at all limited to Islamist circles. The belief in a Jewish world conspiracy characterizes the general historical and political consciousness in much of the Middle East. However, the main reason for this is not the reference to The Protocols in Section 32 of the Hamas Charter or other extremist propaganda. The Jews’ responsibility for every evil on earth is, rather, a very common, academic, and centrist worldview in Arab nations.[1]

• September 11th was the Jews or the Mossad.

• The Jews are behind ISIS.

• And certainly, we created the coronavirus.

• And the latest, I’ve already heard it several times: Israel was behind October 7 because they were looking for an excuse to commit genocide in Gaza.

It would not be the first time Abraham’s kids were accused of intentionally killing people. In the Middle Ages, as Europeans died of the Black Death, Jews were scapegoated and accused, without any proof, of poisoning the water wells and unleashing the plague. “Hundreds of millions of people have believed (and in the Arab world, many still do) that Jews drink the blood of non-Jews, that they cause plagues and poison wells, that they secretly plot to conquer the world, and that they murdered God.”[2] Some were tortured until they "confessed" to poisoning the wells. The punishment was genocide (a word that is misused every day).

A month later, the verdict against the Jews was announced: “All Jews from the age of seven cannot excuse themselves from this crime, since all of them in their totality were cognizant and are guilty of the above actions. Jewish children under the age of seven were then baptized and reared as Christians after their families were murdered.”[3]

In a report on antisemitic scapegoating, the Jerusalem Post wrote:

Similarly, in recent decades, Israelis have been spitefully accused by the Egyptian media of poisoning Israeli fruits and vegetables exported to Egypt. In 2007, panic ensued in Saudi Arabia caused by a rumor that Israel had smuggled AIDS-infected melons into the country via a secret “ground corridor.” The Saudi government had to go public to explain that this virus cannot be transferred to people via fruit. At the height of the Avian Flu scare in 2006, the official Syrian state daily, al-Thawra, wrote that Israel had intentionally developed the virus to harm its Arab neighbors.[4]

Jews have been accused of kidnapping Christian children (or Arab or Palestinian, depending on where you are spreading the libel) and ritually draining their blood for the use in making matzah for Passover. Getting back to 9/11, many in the Islamic world do not believe that Osama Bin Laden carried out the attacks, but rather the Jews did it, of course. Haven’t you heard, no Jews died on 9/11! They all received a phone call that morning not to go to work, or so the libel goes. Some young Christians in France asked me if that was true! (It wasn’t… I know of many Jewish people who died in the Twin Towers.)

Not only were Jews blamed for the Great Depression, but the more recent 2008, Great Recession. There is no global woe that has not been blamed on the Jews. The media are anti-Israel, but somehow the Jews control the media? Figure that out! The Jews control the banks, but many of the 200,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel have almost nothing. Somebody should tell Switzerland, who ended up with a lot of Jewish money after the Holocaust, that Jews control the banks![5]

Much of this goes back to the early Church Fathers, who blamed the Jews for killing Yeshua. Forget the fact that Yeshua said, “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18), and that God, through Paul, urged the gentile-Christian world to love Israel (Romans 9, 11). The hatred that these Church Fathers had for the Jews was palpable and aggressive and led to the deaths of millions of Jews.

They ignored the writings of the apostle to the nations, Paul, and instead created a narrative that was still being used by the Nazis who said, “You killed Jesus, we will kill you.”

My prayer for you is that you will be a sheep, not a goat. The pressure will be intense. I can already see people turning against Israel. They've already forgotten October 7 and have concluded that Israel is committing genocide. I'm praying for you!

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[1] “WJC ANALYSIS - Carmen Matussek: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Arab world,” World Jewish Congress, October 7, 2013, https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/wjc-analysis-carmen-matussek-the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-in-the-arab-world

[2] Prager, Dennis; Telushkin, Joseph. Why the Jews?: The Reason for Antisemitism (p. 17). Touchstone. Kindle Edition.

[3] Prager and Telushkin, Why the Jews?, 95.

[4] Manfred Gerstenfeld and Jamie Berk, “Anti-Semitism: 2,000 years of scapegoating the Jews,” Jerusalem Post, May 24, 2015,

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/anti-semitism-2000-years-of-scapegoating-the-jews-403959

[5] “World Jewish Congress lawsuit against Swiss banks,” Wikipedia, accessed November 13, 2023,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Jewish_Congress_lawsuit_against_Swiss_banks