Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: JAM (02/09/17)
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TITLE: The Chosen | Previous Challenge Entry
By Gary Ritter
02/13/17 -
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The “coincidence” bothered me. In recent months I’d noticed many similar convergences of devastating storms that occurred at exactly the same time that the President, or one of his top officials, spoke against Israel keeping its land intact and stressing the need for that nation to be flexible with its borders. As a top aide to the Chief Executive I had his ear, but the suspicions I’d begun to harbor were so far out there that I figured he’d laugh me right out of my position at the White House if I shared them.
I’d never had any particular affinity toward Israel, so I certainly didn’t come to my concerns from a Zionist perspective. In fact, I went to a church that didn’t have much respect for Israel at all. Our doctrine taught that the church was the new Israel, that Israel itself had sinned so greatly against God that He had all but abandoned it. To top it off, my church participated in the BDS Movement to Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Israel at every turn. I hadn’t been a part of our protests because of my high-level position, but a significant number of our members had marched in opposition to anything Israel.
With this background in a church I’d attended for twenty years, to see what I thought I was seeing disturbed me, to say the least. Could the actions of our nation against the interests of Israel be the primary cause for the destruction that the storms and other events were wreaking on America?
Our church took a rather loose approach to the Bible. I’d never questioned it before, but as I thought about the issue, I realized how far we were from a strict, literal interpretation of Scripture. Actually, what our pastor did week in and week out was to pick and choose those passages that aligned with his and our denomination’s way of thinking and looking at the world. Because Jesus never spoke directly against homosexuality, it was obvious He had no problem with it. Since He’d never condemned abortion, then it must be permissible, at least in certain instances. As the Jews had been the ones to crucify Christ, surely God held them, and them alone, responsible for His death, thus creating the final condition for Him to abandon the nation of Israel as a whole. Obviously, He’d given Israel a second chance after it had been destroyed by the Babylonians, but the second destruction by the Romans near the end of the 1st century was the end. God had dealt with Israel fairly, it rejected Him, so He had rejected it. Simple. It meant we—the church—now carried God’s mantle going forward, and we had every right to spit on the Jews as God had done.
That should have been the end of it as far as I was concerned. But those “coincidences” kept niggling at the edge of my mind.
I spent weeks in research on the issue and saw that without fail our actions precipitated a disaster of some sort on America. Hurricanes, tornadoes, economic catastrophes; each correlated with what I came to see as an attack on Israel. Part of my research included actually reading the Bible. I saw that God called Israel the “apple of His eye.” More critically, I read Genesis 12:3 in which God stated, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.”
As I came under great conviction, that verse worried me immensely. My quandary was whether or not I should press the President to abandon his quest to broker a two-state solution. He believed in it explicitly and was all-in on this effort. Worse, he didn’t take criticism well once he’d made up his mind to pursue a course of action.
Would I still have a job after I tried to convince the President of his folly? I had to try. I made an appointment with him for the day after a major speech he planned on Israel’s intransigence and came to him that next morning. He had the TV on. The debt crisis had exploded. Our economy was in freefall.
“Mr. President,” I began. “I have something to tell you.”
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