HOW TO NOT GET DRUNK ON JERUSALEM
Riots in Jerusalem. Palestinian mobs desecrating Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount. Over 1,050+ Hamas rockets fired at Israel in 38 hours. Multiple casualties on all sides, and untold wounded. Where do we begin?
I, like many of you, watched footage of the Iron Dome intercepting barrages of rockets barreling towards Tel Aviv—some 150 at a time, in an appalling effort to find vulnerabilities in the Iron Dome (I can’t think of anything more wicked than trying to sabotage a Holocaust survivor’s self-defense so you can kill them in spite of it)—as Israelis uploaded them in real time the evening of May 11, 2021. But unlike most of you, I wasn’t an ocean away at the time. I live in Israel’s Golan Heights, a stone’s throw up the road—close enough to Hezbollah that I have 15 seconds to get into my bomb shelter when the sirens go off (depending on where Israeli citizens and residents live, we might have up to a minute and a half to find safe shelter from rockets).
I—gratefully—woke up the next day to dozens of texts from concerned friends and family, wondering if I was okay. “It’s quiet here,” I (admittedly) copied and pasted into all the different threads. “Just pray Hezbollah doesn’t enter Hamas’ chat thread.” But our hearts are heavy for the center and south of the country, and for Palestinians living under the fist of an internationally recognized terrorist organization that exploits them like pawns so that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) can play their bloodthirsty games with Israel.
The other question I’m receiving most this week is something like, “There are so many narratives online, and I don’t know what to think of it. All these news agencies and social media influencers have a really good argument that Israel is this apartheid juggernaut bully….but if that were true, I’m kinda hoping you wouldn’t live there, but you live there.…How do I wrap my head around this?”
This is a sincere question, and the answer itself is two-fold. On the immediate hand, we want to be a people of critical thought, cognitive aptitude, and reason. We don’t want to be swayed by well-crafted narratives that anyone with amateur editorial skills can sell online, but we so often are. Consider this confession from an Associated Press reporter:
“At the end of 2008 I was a desk editor, a local hire in The Associated Press’s Jerusalem bureau, during the first serious round of violence in Gaza after Hamas took it over the year before. [Allow me (Stephanie) to make this note here: Hamas took power immediately after Israel expelled every Jewish resident of the Gaza Strip, in a deal called “Land for Peace.” It obviously did not work; this is one of many holes in the ‘Palestinian violence is due to Israeli occupation’ narrative.] That conflict was grimly similar to the American campaign in Iraq, in which a modern military fought in crowded urban confines against fighters concealed among civilians. Hamas understood early that the civilian death toll was driving international outrage at Israel, and that this, not I.E.D.s or ambushes, was the most important weapon in its arsenal.
Early in that war, I complied with Hamas censorship in the form of a threat to one of our Gaza reporters and cut a key detail from an article: that Hamas fighters were disguised as civilians and were being counted as civilians in the death toll. The bureau chief later wrote that printing the truth after the threat to the reporter would have meant ‘jeopardizing his life.’ Nonetheless, we used that same casualty toll throughout the conflict and never mentioned the manipulation.
Hamas understood that Western news outlets wanted a simple story about villains and victims and would stick to that script, whether because of ideological sympathy, coercion or ignorance. The press could be trusted to present dead human beings not as victims of the terrorist group that controls their lives, or of a tragic confluence of events, but of an unwarranted Israeli slaughter. The willingness of reporters to cooperate with that script gave Hamas the incentive to keep using it.”[1]
Or consider former President Bill Clinton’s response when someone hollered at him during a campaign rally for Hillary in 2016:
Audience Member: “What about Gaza?”
Bill Clinton: “What about Gaza?”
AM: “There were human beings in Gaza.”
BC: “Yes there were. Yes there were—now wait a minute—yes there were. And Hamas is really smart. When they decide to rocket Israel, they insinuate themselves in hospitals, in the schools, in the highly populous areas, and they are smart. So they try to put the Israelis in a position of either not defending themselves or killing innocents. They’re good at it. They’re smart. They’ve been doing this a long time. Look—I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state. I had a deal they turned down that would’ve given them all of Gaza, between 96 and 97% of the West Bank, compensating land in Israel, you name it. Then when Mr. Fayed was the Prime Minister of the Palestinians on the West Bank, we had all the Muslim countries willing to normalize relations with Israel….”[2]
Years before the Abraham Accords, Bill Clinton fought for a peace plan in the Middle East that he failed to achieve because Palestinian leadership literally walked away from the dream deal Israel put on the table. Pretty frustrating—but we have a better voice within the FAI family to clearly and concisely communicate the chessboard powder keg that is the Israeli-Palestinian issue, so I’ll leave that to Marco Moreno.[3]
On the less immediate (but eternally critical) hand is the question of what God thinks about all of this, and in this way I am not speaking to or writing this for people who do not confess the Lordship of Jesus. Sometimes the dead must bury their dead[4] and the confessing Body must calibrate to covenantal fidelity along the (very) narrow road of truth.[5] And that’s what this is ultimately about: covenantal fidelity, and a very, very narrow road that, in the words of Jesus, is “difficult to find.”[6]
Ditches run along either side of this narrow road of truth, both with steep mudslides into a God-ordained drunken stupor. Let me say that again: God has set this thing up such that if you do not walk on the path He has laid out in the narrow way, you will slide on the mud of confusion and fall into a ditch of drunken delusion. Our brother Stuart Greaves, who serves on the leadership team at IHOPKC, said it best in Covenant and Controversy II: The City of the Great King:
“The prophet warns us about touching Jerusalem in an inappropriate way. He said, ‘If you touch Jerusalem in an inappropriate way, you get hit with a sense of drunkenness; drunkenness meaning you lose all sobriety and all reality and all discernment.’[7] But the way that Jerusalem gets touched in an inappropriate way is in two ways; you touch Jerusalem in an inappropriate, antisemitic way, where we are anti-Jerusalem, seeking to annihilate the Jews, and so forth. But another way you touch Jerusalem in an inappropriate way is by being for Israel in a way that God is not for her. In other words, there’s a certain positivism in regards to the Land, that that could actually lead to a lack of sobriety as well, as much as antisemitism can lead to a lack of sobriety. Which is why we want to connect with Israel like Paul did by being in Christ,[8] by being in fellowship with Him, asking Him, ‘Lord, what are You thinking? Lord, what are You feeling? Lord, open my eyes to Your law that I might see wonderful things because I want to be lined up with truth when it comes to Jerusalem, not sentiment.’”[9]
The Holy Spirit Himself vouched for Paul’s sincerity when the apostle said if he could trade his own salvation that all Israel—national, ethnic, actual-grandchild-of-Jacob Israel—would come into the revelation of Jesus as Messiah, he would. But he isn’t Jesus, so he couldn’t. Yet the apostolic heart yokes itself to the Holocaust of the Son of Man.[10] Anyone who cannot truthfully say “I tell the truth in Christ, I am not lying, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and continual grief in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my countrymen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God. Amen.”[11] needs to sit down.
As Messianic Jew Adolph Saphir remarked, “Behold, Jesus Christ still weeping over Jerusalem through the eyes of Paul.”[12]
And this is the question I ask myself and submit to you: Does Jesus weep through your eyes?
If not, why not? What ditch are you in? What delusion are you drunk on?
We devoted Covenant and Controversy I: The Great Rage to the past, present, and future rage against the stewards of the covenant (national and ethnic Israel) from pagan, Christian, and Islamic sources.[13] One thing the Christian world needs to reckon with is our ditch of divestment theology that has spent centuries bankrupting the Gospel of the Kingdom[14] of any actual Kingdom promise carried in the burden of the prophets and the apostles. Paul warned Rome against ignorance of the eternal purposes of God as they’ve been bound up in and revealed by His formation of and relationship with national, ethnic, and territorial Israel, because that ignorance could and would breed arrogance.[15] And it has. Worse yet, it’s made arrogant disciples.
God has good things in store for every nation and people group on earth; this gorgeous promise is a tenet of the very everlasting covenant that Jesus bled for.[16] He promised Abram a Seed (Eve’s Seed, who would crush the skull of the serpent),[17] land, and blessing for the nations. Jerusalem, the city aflame, she who “kills the prophets and stones the ones who are sent to her”[18] will one day be known as the “City of Peace” and “THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.”[19] Remember, the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable.[20] We’ll return to this in a minute.
First, we need to reckon with our arrogant disciples produced by our own ignorance and refusal to reckon with the mysteries of God’s eternal purposes. As I reported in 2018’s “Gaza and the Gospel of the Kingdom,”[21] 99.1% of the Palestinian populous (some 5 million+ people) has not received a witness of the Gospel of the Kingdom. I would personally argue that figure is even higher; not all Palestinian Christians nurse and nurture their animosity towards the State of Israel (“I’m not an antisemite! I’m just an anti-Zionist”), but many of them do—and they get away with it because Rome-wrought “covenantal theology” (better understood as “replacement” or “divestment” theology) has produced a grotesque masquerade of discipleship known as “Palestinian Liberation Theology.”
I’ll limit my problems with this ideology to its premise, that the Palestinian people are David, and Israel is Goliath.
When we fashion a gospel out of the idol of social justice, we get something asinine like this. Yet the prophets and apostles beckon us to lift up our eyes and behold the One on the throne, who bled and died, and who is coming again.[22]
When David brought lunch to his brothers and heard Goliath taunting Saul’s brigades, challenging a chosen Israelite to a one-on-one showdown with slavery and a cancellation of the Exodus on the line, the young shepherd from Bethlehem was appalled. “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine who defies the armies of the living God?”[23] Hear me: he wasn’t asking, “Who is this ugly pagan trying to pick a fight with us super cool people?” He was incredulous that an “uncircumcised Philistine”—a man whose life was in opposition to the everlasting covenant and eternal purposes of God—would pick a fight, ultimately, with the living God. David didn’t have an unsanctified Zionism that day in the Valley of Elah. He had an unwavering confidence in and commitment to the God who makes and cuts covenants. He knew that’s the safest place to posture a human heart, and he stayed there all his days.[24] Notably, David then took Goliath’s head to Jerusalem[25]—which was, at the time, politically insignificant. But David could see something in the heart of God for that city.[26]
When a woman from modern-day southern Lebanon found Jesus and begged Him to heal her demonized daughter, He ignored her.[27] She kept at it, and wouldn’t relent (much like the widow in Luke 18). His disciples, ever known for their abounding compassion and similarity to the Godhead, offered to get rid of her so they wouldn’t have to hear the inconvenience of her desperation. Jesus, blessedly, ignored the immaturity of the twelve apostles to make a point through this interaction—a point we need to have clarity on today.
He replied, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
But she came, knelt before Him, and said, “Lord, help me!”
He answered, “It isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
“Yes, Lord,” she said, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
Then Jesus replied to her, “Woman, your faith is great. Let it be done for you as you want.” And from that moment her daughter was healed.[28]
Here is a very not-Jewish Gentile approaching the Son of David and begging Him for help. If we miss the eternal purposes of God in the everlasting covenant, Jesus just sounds like a Grade A Meanie in this passage. But this incredible woman did not miss these critical issues, and Jesus drew this confession out of her for all of us to hear—and heed. Consider this paraphrase of the verses above:
Jesus: “I cut a covenant on the hills of Hebron to form a nation-state wherein I’ll reveal My eternal purposes and glory to the world. The house of Israel is therefore marked with a covenantal peculiarity your people are not marked with.”
Lebanese Woman*: “You are the LORD, and I know enough about You to know You can help me.”
Jesus, shrugging: “The covenantal provisions are for the children of the covenant.”
Lebanese Woman: “I’ve heard about You, and I’ve heard about Your covenant—and I submit to Your right to do what You will as You will, when You will and how You will, to whom You will and through whom You will. And I know You’re going to bless the nations through this covenant—I know there’s enough of You to go around, and even a Gentile like me can receive the overflow from the covenantal table.”
Jesus: “YOU GOT IT! I love your faith!”
Here is a woman walking on the narrow way.
Here is a woman sober, free from the delusions and intoxications of ethnic tensions, cultural collisions, and geopolitical strife.
Here is a woman beholding the Man, the Master of the Covenantal Table.
“I am going to make Jerusalem a cup that causes staggering to all the peoples around; and when the siege is against Jerusalem, it will also be against Judah.”[29]
The cup of staggering, cup of stupor, is engineered to push us into the God of the Everlasting Covenant, the One who died to kill the carnality in us—because nothing of the flesh will survive eternity. Everything that is not of Him will burn in the fire of His coming.[30] He is the rock that we either fall onto in submission, or it falls on us to break us.[31] This is why the trembling drunkenness of Jerusalem is, in the prophet’s words above, inextricably knit to the final siege against Jerusalem—that is, the Day of the LORD. This isn’t ultimately about Jerusalem—the “city of the Great King.”[32] It is, very simply, about the Great King who is eternally purposed to rule and reign from David’s throne within her.[33] His city simply confronts us with Him—that is her burden, one we are meant to bear with her in intercession.[34]
In this era of rocket fury and the drunken stupor saturating social media, guard your heart.[35] The only Goliath is the antichristic spirit that opposes the eternal purposes of God bound up in the everlasting covenant.
Carrying the message of the Day of the LORD broke the backs of every prophet entrusted with it. Do not approach this lightly. Do not try to pick this stone of stumbling up haphazardly. Look to the Master, the LORD of the Covenant, the God of Israel with the same humility and confidence the Gentile woman appealed to Him with. And may we lift up our eyes from our carnal conversations and arguments, see the mountain, climb to the top of it and bear the burden of the prophets, the friends of God:[36]
Zion, herald of good news,
go up on a high mountain.
Jerusalem, herald of good news,
raise your voice loudly.
Raise it, do not be afraid!
Say to the cities of Judah,
“Here is your God!”[37]
How delightful on the mountains
Are the feet of one who brings good news,
Who announces peace
And brings good news of happiness,
Who announces salvation,
And says to Zion, “Your God reigns!”[38]
Stephanie Quick (@quicklikesand) is a writer/producer serving with FAI. She lives in the Golan Heights and cohosts The Better Beautiful podcast with Jeff Henderson. Browse her free music, films, and books in the FAI App and at stephaniequick.org.
*I understand she was not then Lebanese, but as she was from that area at the time of writing, I want to help you understand the significance of this conversation from the soil that is now an Iranian proxy and Hezbollah stronghold.
[1] Friedman, Matti. “Falling for Hamas's Split-Screen Fallacy.” The New York Times, May 16, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/hamas-israel-media-protests.html (bold and italic emphases are my own)
[2] Or you can watch this exchange here
[3] IDF Lt. Col. (res) Marco Moreno is the architect of Operation Good Neighbor, and Director of FAI Israel. He has contributed several episodes to THE WIRE podcast, which you can access on Apple, Spotify, and the FAI App.
[4] Luke 9:60
[5] Matthew 7:13-14
[6] ibid.
[7] See Zechariah 12:1-4
[8] See Romans 9:1-5
[9] Or you can watch this segment here (starting at 1:32:05)
[10] For an exposition of this language, please watch Dalton Thomas’ session in episode 1 of KING OF SHADOWS: The Slaughter & the Hill
[11] Romans 9:1-5, NKJV
[12] Saphir, Adolph. Christ and Israel: Lectures and Addresses on the Jews, 1911. Morgan and Scott Ld: London, 99. (Charles Spurgeon admired Saphir for being remarkably “mighty in the Scriptures.)
[13] Covenant and Controversy is a five-part film series still in production; Parts I-III are free at covenantandcontroversy.com/films and in the FAI App. Parts IV and V are in pre-production.
[14] Matthew 24:14
[15] Romans 11:25
[16] Genesis 12:3; Hebrews 13:20
[17] Genesis 3:15
[18] Matthew 23:37
[19] Isaiah 1:26; 2:1-4; Jeremiah 23:6; 33:16; Zechariah 8:3
[20] Romans 11:29
[21] Quick, Stephanie. “Gaza & the Gospel of the Kingdom: An Open Letter to My Fellow Millennials.” Covenant & Controversy, 22 May 2018. https://www.covenantandcontroversy.com/articles/gaza-gospel-kingdom-an-open-letter
[22] Isaiah 64:1; Jeremiah 17:7; Malachi 3:6; 4:1; 2 Thessalonians 1:3-10; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 13:8; 1 Peter 1:3-12—for starters
[23] 1 Samuel 17:26
[24] Isaiah 55:3-5
[25] 1 Samuel 17:54
[26] Psalm 2:1-12
[27] See Matthew 15:21-28
[26] Matthew 15:24-28, CSB
[29] Zechariah 12:2
[30] 1 Corinthians 3:11-15
[31] Luke 20:18
[32] Psalm 48:2; Matthew 5:35
[33] See Psalms 2 and 110; Isaiah and Malachi both explicitly prophesied at length about a King who would reign from Jerusalem and bring peace worldwide. Dig into their texts.
[34] As Reggie Kelly so often says, “Jacob’s trouble is not just Jacob’s problem.” The Lord is looking for friends who will stand in the gap with Him; see Isaiah 52:8; Ezekiel 22:30; Galatians 6:2
[35] See Proverbs 4:23
[36] Amos 3:7; John 15:15
[37] Isaiah 40:9
[38] Isaiah 52:7, quoted also in Romans 10:14-15
