Stephen Sizer, born 27 July, 1953, is a minister in the Church of England. He’s best known for his opposition to Christian Zionism. I oppose it as well. Christian Zionism should be known as an oxymoron! Zionism is a racist ideology which is contrary to the Bible! You will understand that better after listening to or reading Rev. Sizer’s excellent presentation. I’m glad to have Stephen Sizer my friend on Facebook.

Transcription

Thank you for inviting me to contribute to this important conference and give a presentation on a biblical refutation of Christian Zionism.

Let me begin with an introduction. Why is there such a close relationship between the United States and Israel? I believe the reason is inexplicable unless we factor in the influence of Christian Zionism.

What is Christian Zionism? Christian Zionists believe that modern Israel is a continuation of biblical Israel and therefore should enjoy special privileges. They declare that it is the responsibility of Christians to support the State of Israel and its policies.

Benjamin Netanyahu made this quite profound statement a few years ago. He said, “I don’t believe that the Jewish state and modern Zionism would have been possible without Christian Zionism. We value our friends and we never forget them.”

The Pew Research Center in the States has discovered that 25 percent of American Christians believe it’s their responsibility to support the nation of Israel and 63 percent of white evangelicals believe it is their responsibility to support the nation of Israel. So this is predominantly a fundamentalist evangelical movement in the United States, but that’s true of many other countries too.

Here’s a quote from John Hagee. He said, “The sleeping giant of Christian Zionism has awakened. There are 50 million Christians standing up and applauding Israel. Think of our future together. 50 million evangelicals joining in common cause with 5 million Jewish people in America on behalf of Israel. It is a match made in heaven.”

Well, if you are interested in finding out more about Christian Zionism, you can go to my website stephensizer.com, look under the books section and you’ll discover two books I’ve published on the subject, and much of it is available for free in various articles and journal articles.

What I want to focus on in this brief time we have together is a biblical refutation of Christian Zionism. There are seven tenets of Christian Zionism. I’m going to focus on three today.

1. The conviction that the Jews remain God’s chosen people and therefore are privileged.
2. That the land from the river of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean is the promised land and it’s their land exclusively,
3. and that the Jewish temple must be rebuilt.

Now, I liken this theology to a hot air balloon. It’s a theology with very little substance. How many pins do you need to burst a balloon? Well, in this presentation I’m going to give you three, anyone will do, and we’re going to see how from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures how easy it is to deconstruct Christian Zionism or burst the balloon of Christian Zionism.

And the first is that far from being an exclusive people of God, a chosen people, in the scriptures, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the emphasis is that God’s people would be inclusive, inclusive of many nationalities.

For example, in Psalm 87 God says, I will record Rahab and Babylon among those who acknowledge me, Philistia too along with Tyre and Cush, and will say this one was born in Zion. The Lord will write in the register of the peoples, this one was born in Zion. God is saying that if we have faith in the one true God, it is as if we were born in Zion.

You know if you are born somewhere you normally get citizenship, and God is giving it to the Egyptians, to the Iraqis, to the Palestinians, to the Lebanese, to the Africans, and he’s saying that the surrounding nations, if they believe in me, they are my chosen people.

And this is reinforced in the story of Esther. The book of Esther tells a story of God’s deliverance of his people from their enemies, but notice what happens after their victory. It says in Esther 8 verse 17, in every province, in every city, there was joy and gladness among the Jews with feasting and celebrating, and many people of other nationalities became Jews because fear of the Jews had seized them. It means that in the Hebrew scriptures the term Jew did not mean someone who was racially pure and descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It simply meant someone who believed in the one true God and identified with God’s people.

So God’s people have always been inclusive. But the land too, the land, God’s land was always intended to be an inclusive land, welcoming people of other nationalities who worship the one true God. It was never given exclusively to the Jewish people as a racial people.

Let me explain this from the scriptures. The book of Leviticus in the Torah, God says the land must not be sold permanently because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Zionists like to think God has given them the freehold. That means the land is theirs. But God isn’t. God was giving them leasehold. They could build their homes on his land, but the land remained His.

And when God’s people were thrown out of the land and they came back from exile from Assyria and from the surrounding nations, God gave them these instructions under Ezekiel. He said you are to allot the land as an inheritance for yourselves and for the aliens who’ve settled among you and their children. You are to consider them native-born Israelites. Along with you they are to be allotted inheritance among the tribes of Israel. And whatever tribe the alien settles, they are to give him his inheritance.

Ezekiel 47:21  So shall ye divide this land unto you according to the tribes of Israel.
22  And it shall come to pass, that ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel.
23  And it shall come to pass, that in what tribe the stranger sojourneth, there shall ye give him his inheritance, saith the Lord GOD.

Three times in three verses, God says share the land. Why would God have to say it three times in three consecutive verses? Because they didn’t want to share the land any more than the Zionists want to share it today. That was God’s purpose. The land was to be shared because God’s people were open to all nations.

And then thirdly, the greatest threat at the moment in Jerusalem is the fear that the Zionists will destroy the Dome of the Rock, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and seek to rebuild their Jewish temple for animal sacrifices. But again, what do we find in the scriptures? We find that the temple was intended as a place of worship for all nations.

This is a passage from Isaiah 56. Isaiah 56. God says, let no foreigner who’s bowing themselves to the Lord say the Lord will surely exclude me from his people. Foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants. These I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer. My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.

Now just think about it. Why would foreigners say the Lord will exclude me from his people if God explicitly says, let no foreigner say the Lord will exclude me from his people? Well, the reason people said it, even when God said don’t say it, is because the Lord’s people were doing the excluding. Precisely what they’re doing today. They want an exclusive temple in place of the Haram al-Sharif rather than a place of prayer for all nations.

God’s purpose throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures was to build one new humanity. A humanity of all nations. And we see this particularly in the last book of the Christian scriptures, the book of Revelation. In Revelation chapter 7, the apostle John is given a vision of the future, a vision of heaven, and in it he sees this. “After this I looked,” he says, “and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, tribe, people, and language standing before the throne of God before the Lamb.”

This is the vision of heaven, and that should be our motivation to challenge and refute Zionism and its selective interpretation of the scriptures which I’ve tried to show reveal an inclusive people, an inclusive land, an inclusive temple, because God’s purpose is to bring the nations together in one humanity under God.

A biblical refutation of Christian Zionism. I’ve given you a brief flavour of how the scriptures themselves refute the exclusivity, the supremacy, the racism of Christian Zionism, and I hope I’ve shown you how simple it is to burst their balloon.

If you’d like to know more about how to achieve this, then there is a copy of a summary of my book. It’s called Seven Biblical Answers, The Relationship Between Israel and the Church, and you can find this on my website stephensizer.com, and also, as I said, the text of my books in various languages is freely available from my website. And if you’d like to know more about our work, then you can find out more from our charity website, http://peacemakers.ngo/. (Presently offline.) Thank you for allowing me to contribute this presentation.

Thank you, and God bless you.

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