Do Christians Want "Jews to Die" to Hasten the Second Coming?<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
By Jerry Newcombe
9/10/12
 
This seems like a preposterous statement, that Christians just Jews to die. But it was uttered just last week by someone of rank in one of our two major political parties.
 
The Chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party, Mark Alan Siegel, told PatrioticUpdate.com at the DNC: "The Christians just want us [Jews] to be there so we can be slaughtered and converted and bring on the second coming of Jesus Christ…They're not our friends. They want Israel to pursue policies that are antithetical with its security and existence."
 
But Siegel said, "The worst possible allies for the Jewish state are the fundamentalist Christians who want Jews to die and convert so they can bring on the second coming of their Lord. It is a false friendship. They are seeking their own ends and not ours."
 
On 9/7/12, Florida Democratic Party Chairman Rod Smith condemned Siegel's remarks, stating they do not reflect the Party's views: "Today I asked for Mark Alan Siegel's resignation. He has declined. He is embarrassed and humiliated by his inappropriate comments and has requested an indefinite leave of absence, which I have granted." By 9/8, Siegel had resigned.
 
Siegel also issued an apology: "…I apologize to all Christians, Jews and other people of faith for any embarrassment or anger my remarks may have caused. Throughout my life I have practiced religious tolerance among all people of faith….I alone am responsible for my remarks and I pray that they are not taken as the position of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party."
 
It's all ironic in light of the fact that support for Israel is stronger from Christians than any other non-Jewish group. Michael Medved, a Jewish conservative, quotes Zev Chafets, author of A Match Made in Heaven (on evangelicals and Israel): "The dislike and contempt for evangelical Christians that is so integral to American Jewish cultural and political thinking is almost wholly absent in Israel… The average Israeli-even the average anticlerical secular Israeli like me-appreciates evangelical support" (commentarymagazine.com, May 2012).
 
For the record, there is no part of the New Testament that says that those of the Jewish faith must be slaughtered first before Jesus will return to planet earth: SILENCE. It's not there. There is nothing in either the Old or New Testaments that makes such an outrageous claim.
 
There is no part from any creed of historic Christianity in all of its branches---Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant---that says that those of the Jewish faith must be slaughtered before the Second Coming. SILENCE. It's not there.
 
Perhaps some strange interpretations of Revelation could possibly be distorted to reach this kind of view. But G. K. Chesterton once said: "Though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creatures so wild as one of his own commentators."
 
Did "Christians" do bad things to Jews through the centuries? Absolutely. Inexcusably. Dr. Michael Brown, a Jewish believer in Jesus Christ, wrote a book chronicling such things: Our Hands Are Stained with Blood: The Tragic Story of the "Church" and the Jewish People.
They're inexcusable and at total odds with what Jesus Himself and the apostles taught.
 
Some commentators try to link the Nazis with Christianity. But that is not accurate. The Nazis were anti-Christian.
 
While many church leaders and laypeople did cave to Hitler, there was still a faithful remnant.
TIME magazine (12/23/1940) reported this in an article entitled "Religion: German Martyrs."
Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Führer. These defiant words of Pastor Martin Niemoller were echoed by millions of Germans. And Hitler raged: "It is Niemoller or I."
So this second Christmas of Hitler's war finds Niemoller and upwards of 200,000 other Christians (some estimates run as high as 800,000) behind the barbed wire of the frozen Nazi concentration camps. Here men bear mute witness that the Christ-whose birth the outside world celebrates unthinkingly at Christmas-can still inspire a living faith for which men and women even now endure imprisonment, torture and death as bravely as in centuries past.
 
Adolf Hitler once declared: "The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew."
 
After the Nazis surrendered, the Draft for the War Crimes Staff (7/6/1945) noted: "Throughout the period of National Socialist rule (of Germany), religious liberties in Germany were seriously impaired. The various Christian Churches were systematically cut off from effective communication with the people…Under the pretext that the Churches themselves were interfering in political and state matters, they would deprive the Churches, step by step, of all opportunity to affect German public life."
 
Rabbi Daniel Lapin, an Orthodox Jew, has pointed out that modern America is not the same as Medieval Europe: "No country in the last two thousand years has provided the same haven of tranquility and prosperity for Jews as had the United States of America. And, this is not in spite of Americans being Christian; it is because of it. You might say that America's Bible belt is the Jewish communities' safety belt."
 
I'm thankful for Siegel's apology, and I hope he will understand that true Christians love Jews.
 
 
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Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is co-host of and spokesman for Truth that Transforms with D. James Kennedy (formerly The Coral Ridge Hour). He has also written or co-written 23 books, including The Book That Made America: How the Bible Formed Our Nation and Answers from the Founding Fathers. Jerry co-wrote (with Dr. Peter Lillback) the bestselling, George Washington's Sacred Fire. www.truthinaction.org.