Marilyn Brown has sent in a follow up article to Joan Swirsky’s report on anti-semitism in America. following Biblical history carefully Marilyn finds the signs of anti-semitism beginning here in Australia. Marilyn gives us due warning and many thanks to her for this warning.

Gibber! Gibber!

Chugley

THE BIBLICAL BACKGROUND TO ANTI-SEMITISM

Marilyn Brown

Thanks to Joan Swirsky for her updates on the progress of anti-Semitism in the U.S.A. (see post “carefully Taught, July 19th). As in America, so will it go here in Australia.  We shake our heads in horror and remember, with grief, the unimaginable images of the holocaust that, fortunately, some T.V. Channels still show to keep our remembrance alive.  However, we need to understand that what seems to be an inexplicably irrational response in this age of loudly-trumpeted “racism”, in fact is old as time and goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden and the fall of Adam and Eve.

Lucifer was created by God as the highest of all His angelic hosts, but he wasn’t satisfied with this position and desired to usurp God Himself:

“You were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.  You were in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was your covering:  the sardius, topaz and diamond; beryl, onyx and jasper; sapphire, turquoise and emerald, with gold.  The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes was prepared for you on the day you were created.  You were the anointed cherub who covers; I established you; you were on the holy mountain of God; you walked back and forth in the midst of fiery stones.  You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created, till iniquity was found in you.” (Ezekiel 28:12-15)

This led to Lucifer’s being thrown out of heaven to the earth.

“How you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!….For you have said in your heart:  ‘I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God…….I will be like the Most High.’” (Isaiah 14:12-14)

“Therefore I cast you as a profane thing out of the mountain of God; and I destroyed you, O covering cherub, from the midst of the fiery stones.  Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendour; I cast you to the ground….” (Ezekiel 28:16-17)

He would now be known as Satan – the Adversary.  In the guise of the serpent, Satan persuaded Eve, who persuaded Adam, to ignore God’s warning against eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and his success in duping Adam and Eve would mean that the God-given authority over the earth, which belonged to Adam and Eve, would now pass into Satan’s hands.   

However, God warned him that, eventually, One would come who would make him pay for what he had done and would utterly destroy him.

“Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field; on your belly you shall go and you shall eat dust all the days of your life.  And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise His heel.” (Genesis 3:14-15)

There is no question that Satan would have understood that this prophecy referred somehow to a supernatural being as we see, in Eve’s response to the birth of her first-born son, Cain, that she had fully grasped the idea that salvation would come through a God-Man, but this truth is obscured in almost all Bible translations for no other reason than that men through the ages thought that God must have inadvertently made a mistake. 

The New King James Version reads:  “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain and said, ‘I have acquired a man from the Lord.’” (Genesis 4:1).  However, a literal translation of the Hebrew text would read:  “And the man knew Eve his wife, she conceived and bare Cain and said, ‘I have gotten a man:  Jehovah.”

Jewish rabbinic translators also took liberties with the text, using such “acceptable” translations as “with the help of the Lord”, “to the Lord”, and “unto the Lord”.  In the Midrash Rabbah, the rabbinic commentary on the first five books of the Bible, Rabbi Akiba admits:  “If it is said, ‘I have gotten a man:  the Lord’ it would have been difficult to interpret…….it might imply that she had begotten the Lord.”

Without understanding yet how this was to play out, Satan and his demonic hoards were on the warpath against all of mankind and our Adversary came up with the bright idea that he should have his own forces to combat this unknown Seed whenever He may appear.  So:

“Now it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God [fallen angels] saw the daughters of men, that they were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves of all whom they chose……There were giants on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them.  Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.” (Genesis 6:1-4)

But God intervened and sent Noah’s flood, leaving just eight people to carry on the human race – Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives.  The three sons were Shem, Ham and Japheth.  Noah pronounced a special blessing on Shem and his descendants who would be the Shemites, or Semitic peoples.  From this line would come Abram (later to become Abraham) and God said to Abram:

“Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.  I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis12:1-3)

Old and childless, Abraham is given a promise by God that he and his wife, Sarah, would, miraculously, have a son.  Satan attempted to circumvent this promise (could this be the promised “Seed of the woman”?) and inspired Sarah to offer her handmaid as a surrogate mother to bear Abraham’s child..  This son, Ishmael, would be the father of the Arab nations – enemies  throughout history of the son, Isaac, who would ultimately be born to Abraham and Sarah.  Isaac’s son, Jacob, would have twelve sons. 

“Then God appeared to Jacob again….And God said to him, ‘Your name is Jacob; your name shall not be called Jacob any more, but Israel shall be your name.’…..I am God Almighty.  Be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall proceed from you, and kings shall come from your body.  The land which I gave Abraham and Isaac I give to you; and to your descendants after you I give this land.’” (Genesis 35:9-12)

Now there was a specific people group whom God had singled out for His purposes, with the promise of a special land, Canaan, which would become their own, so Satan turned his malevolence on these Semites –  the Israelites –  and anti-Semitism was born.

Famine drove the Israelites, through God’s miraculous intervention, out of Canaan and into the land of Egypt where they dwelt and flourished for 430 years.  So great was their success that the Pharaoh of the time became alarmed (no doubt provoked to fear by our Adversary).

“And he said to his people, ‘Look, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply and it happen, in the event of war, that they also join our enemies and fight against us and so go up out of the land.” (Exodus 1:9-10)

Pharaoh’s solution was to force the Israelites into hard labour (sound familiar?) and to slaughter all the male children at birth.  (Can we fail to see the mind behind both this scenario and, centuries later, that of Hitler and the Nazi regime?)  However, God is mightier than Satan and the midwives, who were God-fearing, simply did not do as Pharaoh had commanded them, “….and the people multiplied and grew very mighty” (Exodus 1:20).

Realizing that he couldn’t count on the midwives, Pharaoh gave the same command to all his people and the threat to the newborn sons became very great.  And so we come to the amazing story of Moses, whose mother placed him in a basket and set it afloat in the river just as Pharaoh’s daughter came down to bathe.  As hoped, the daughter found the babe and decided to adopt him.  Moses was brought up in the very palaces and courts of Pharaoh who had desired his death.  By the time Moses was grown, the hardships placed on the Israelites in the labour camps were unbearable.  But Moses had been chosen by God to save the people and lead them out of Egypt and, finally, into the land of Canaan which God had set aside for this people He intended to make His own for the purpose of His plan of salvation for the whole world.

History both in and outside the Bible records the ups and downs of the Israelites – their faithfulness and their rebellion; their conquests and their being conquered.  But God sent them prophets to both warn them and encourage them to remain faithful.  One of the most specific and unambiguous prophecies, which would have given Satan pause, is that given by Isaiah:

“Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign:  Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel [God with us]……For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder.  And His name will be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even forever.  The zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this.” (Isaiah 7:14; 9:6-7)

So there it was!  Satan now knew that “the Seed of the woman” would be exactly what God had implied – a God-Man, born to a virgin through a supernatural act of God.  He would, somehow, be the mighty and eternal God Himself – the only One with the power to accomplish the total defeat of Satan and wrest the earth back from his control!

Born quietly and in obscurity, into the family of a carpenter, Yeshua/Jesus arrived whilst his mother and earthly father were away from home, in Bethlehem for the purposes of a Roman census, and in the stable for cattle of an inn which was too full to take them in. 

It was only when this very special Child was around two years old, and, by now, living in the family’s home town of Nazareth, that we see Satan launch another attack.  Wise men (the Maggi) from the East had travelled, probably for a couple of years, to see this new little King and made the mistake of going to Jerusalem to seek Herod’s advice on where they might find Him.

“When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled and all Jerusalem with him.  And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born.  So they said to him ‘In Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it is written by the prophet:….’  Then Herod, when he had secretly called the wise men, determined from them what time the star appeared.  And he sent them to Bethlehem and said, ‘Go and search carefully for the young Child and, when you have found Him, bring back word to me, that I may come and worship Him also.’……..Then, being divinely warned in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed for their own country another way.  Now, when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph [Jesus’ earthly father]in a dream, saying, ‘Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to Egypt and stay there until I bring you word:  for Herod will seek the young Child to destroy Him.’……Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men.” (Matthew 2:1-16)

Just prior to the beginning of His ministry, Jesus spent 40 days and nights alone in the wilderness, fasting.  When He would have been at his most physically vulnerable, our Adversary came to Him and said, “If you are the Son of God, [remember, no-one had made any such claims to date], command that these stones become bread.”  When this failed, Satan tempted Jesus to prove who He was by throwing Himself from the highest point of the Temple, as the Jewish Scriptures promised that the Messiah would be supernaturally protected.  Satan failed and Jesus prevailed.  In a last-ditch attempt, Satan offered to hand back (early, as this was to be, in the future, the reason for Jesus’ return to the earth a second time) all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus would only bow down and worship Satan himself.  Again, he failed!  (see Matthew 4:1-11)

There would be several attempts throughout Jesus’ brief, three-and-a-half-year ministry to kill Him, all of which failed until God’s timing was come.  At this point it is clear that, while Satan understood that Jesus was the promised God-Man who would defeat him, he certainly did not understand how this would play out.

“Now the Feast of Unleavened Bread drew near, which is called Passover.  And the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might kill Him, for they feared the people.  Then Satan entered Judas, surnamed Iscariot, who was numbered among the twelve.  So he went his way and conferred with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray Him to them.  And they were glad and agreed to give him money.  So he promised and sought opportunity to betray Him to them in the absence of the multitude.” (Luke 22:1-5)

With Jesus’ death on the Roman cross, Satan would have imagined that he had been victorious, but his sense of victory would have been short-lived!

“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit, by whom also He went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly were disobedient, when once the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah……” (1 Peter 3:18-20)

“And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up His spirit.  Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked and the rocks were split and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and, coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.” (Matthew 27:50-53)

At the moment of His death, Yeshua ha Mashiach/the Lord Jesus Christ went down into Satan’s very domain – Hades, where the wicked are imprisoned – to display His victory over death, backed up by the resurrection from the dead of those who had died as believers in Jesus.  And then, the final nail in Satan’s coffin (so to speak)!  After three days, Jesus Himself rose from the dead:

“…..He also presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” (Acts 1:3)

Satan now has two enemies on which to focus – Christians who spread the Gospel – the children of Abraham through faith and grafted into the vine (Israel); and the land of Israel as the centre for Messiah’s return and Satan’s ultimate defeat.  Kill off the Jews and the land should cease to exist; kill off the Christians and reconciliation between God and man will be thwarted.

Make no mistake, the persecution, torture and slaughter of Christians has been and still is of shocking proportions and is, along with anti-Semitism, alarmingly on the rise, even in the West.    The 2021 World Watch List (WWL), the latest annual accounting from Open Doors of the top 50 countries where Christians are the most persecuted for following Jesus, reports that, every day, 13 Christians worldwide are killed because of their faith; 12 churches or Christian buildings are attacked; 12 Christians are unjustly arrested or imprisoned, and another 5 are abducted. 

The listed 50 nations contain 309 million Christians living in places with very high or extreme levels of persecution, up from 260 million in last year’s list.  Another 31 million could be added from the 24 nations that fall just outside the top 50 – such as Cuba, Sri Lanka and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – for a ratio of 1 in 8 Christians worldwide facing persecution.  This includes 1 in 6 believers in Africa and 2 out of 5 in Asia.

Last year, 45 nations scored high enough to register “very high” persecution levels on Open Doors’ 84-question matrix.  This year, for the first time in 29 years of tracking, all 50 qualified, PLUS 4 more nations that fell just outside the cut-off.  Since 1992, North Korea has ranked No.1 as the most dangerous place to be a Christian.

Satan now knows that his fate is sealed – it’s there in the Bible in black and white – but he intends to take as many of the human race as he possibly can with him.  Let’s not be one of them!

“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)

“Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea!  For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.” (Revelation 12:12)

References

Christianity Today

Open Doors

Wikipedia,

The Holy Bible, New King James Version (Thomas Nelson, copyright 1982)

“The Seed of the Woman” by Dr. Arnold Fruchtenbaum (The Vineyard, September 2000, The David Press)

Marilyn Brown was born in Sydney, Australia.  A darkly unhappy child and passionately enamoured of horses but unable to own one, by the age of 10, she was suffering from ulcerative colitis, a stress-related illness, causing ulceration of the bowel.  She managed to scrape through the Leaving Certificate at the Methodist Ladies’ College, where evolutionary biology and geography were two of her subjects.  At the age of 21, an on-again/off-again relationship drove her to hand her life over to a God whose Word was not particularly relevant as science had proven that its opening chapters were not.  Classical singing lessons produced a passion to succeed in this field and, at the age of 30, she and Max, her life-long friend and husband of 6 years, set off for England to pursue the dream.  But the Lord had other plans.  Instead of continuing her training, the colitis, which had come as acute attacks at times of stress, now became chronic.  It was Max who directed their search for answers to the Lord, buying books on Christian healing for them to read.  It was through these books that the Lord led them both to be baptized with the Holy Spirit which, soon after, prompted Marilyn to question whether David Attenbrough’s Life on Earth, showing on U.K. television at the time, were the whole story.  Could the Biblical version have any support at all?  As the Lord always does, once we display an interest in the truth, He will see to it that we find it.  It took very few pages of a thick tome, The Creation/ Evolution Controversy, by D.L. Wysong, for the truth to burst the bubble of the evolutionary lie.  From that moment, the passion of Marilyn’s heart has been to point people to the absolute, unshakeable truth of the Bible.  The worsening level of the colitis would send Max and Marilyn back home to Australia where they began attending Hills C.L.C. (now Hillsong), then only 12 months old.  Here they would be nurtured and encouraged to hold fast to the Word of God and would provide an Australia-wide network of prayer as the illness continued its grim progress over the next 10 years, culminating in a perforated bowel that would place Marilyn on life-support in hospital.  However, after 12 years, without any fanfare, the Lord moved and the colitis began to recede so that now, contrary to all medical expectations of this disease, there have now been 19 years that have been free of colitis.  When finally able to return to C.L.C., the Church that had once been Bible-based and Christ-centred seemed to be shifting away from these foundations, subtly at first and now, of course, in a landslide.  It was time to move on.  Marilyn continues to constantly strive to be equipped to impart Biblical truth to whomever should ask questions.  “…and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you…..” (1 Peter 3:1