Part 1: Excuse me, but I do have a memorial in Jerusalem! (Part 1).
Part 2: Excuse me, but I do have a memorial in Jerusalem! (Part 2).
Part 3: Excuse me, but I do have a memorial in Jerusalem! (Part 3).
A Study in Appetites
What I started this post chain to clearly say and what I have so far said are not one-in-the-same. Still, I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed the ride. I hope you have too. The study in appetite certainly did develop, just not as I had anticipated it would. Some of you who have raised children know exactly what I’m talking about. (Dr. Agonson has no children, though I don’t know if anything is physically wrong with him.) I wanted to hone in for the kill, the posts meandered.
So . . . what about the under-addressed issue of whether Satan currently has a PORTION, a RIGHT or a MEMORIAL in Jerusalem, God’s holy city—as established in Judaism from ancient times? Or perhaps a better question is, does it really matter? Let’s take a look. Tonight I hope to get to it.
The overwhelming message of the Old Testament is something like: Wait for Messiah; watch for Messiah. (Messiah is the Hebrew word for Christ.)
The Messiah came in . . . well, 1 AD[1]
With what fulfillment and what result?
In His death, Jesus tore down the dividing wall, so that all men—Jews and gentiles alike—could thereafter come in, be equals, receive God’s kisses. Conversely, if any—Jew or gentile—persistently refuse God’s gracious invitation to come in through this one and only Savior—His very Son—they have rejected, and therefore missed out on, eternal life.
According to New Testament Scripture, that statement is unquestionably true. What room can still remain, therefore, to suggest that Hebrews, as a race, are “God’s people”?
I ask again: Doesn’t Jesus telling the Samaritan woman that “a day is coming in which” worship is not associated with a location or race, but requires only a human heart that is right before God, that is to say, “in spirit and in truth,”—doesn’t that mean that both Jerusalem and the Jews have lost their special status?
Well, to find out if the Jews and/or Jerusalem have in any sense a special status with God in these New Testament times, we need look no further than the answers to these three questions.
- Has Satan exhibited any zeal (appetite) to extinguish the Jewish race?
- Has he succeeded in so doing?
- Did Satan take steps to establish a memorial in Jerusalem beginning about 600 AD?
(If you answered “Yes, no, yes,” you have earned the right to keep reading. Otherwise, you may want to see if you can find a remedial class in this subject.)
Perhaps 70 AD is a fulfillment of Malachi 4:1.[2] What I can say with certainty is that a Holocaust came and spread wider and wider across Europe relatively few years ago.[3] If “that day” didn’t “come burning like a furnace,” somebody tell me what it did do! Satan’s appetite to extinguish the Jewish race is ferocious! So, yes, Satan is actively salivating in his wish (appetite) to kill every last Jew.
Yet neither Hitler, Rome, Islam nor any other Satanically driven leader or people down through the ages has succeeded in their systematic goal to do so. So, no, for all his “valiant” efforts, Satan has fallen short in his quest to eliminate the Jewish race.
Finally, why would Muhammad, the fierce hater of Jews and Christians alike, fabricate such stories as to make his followers suppose he had enjoyed a miraculous journey event to Jerusalem, a city disinterested historians say he never got within a thousand miles of? Why did the (non-) divine, (non-) visit have to be so special that it must thereafter comprise one of Islam’s indispensably sacred sites? Nor do I mean Jerusalem as a general local. We’re talking pinpoint real estate. Can you guess?
That’s right. Of all the 4.5 billion acres of the known world in Muhammad’s day, Allah[4] flew him to the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site. If we were to be exaggeratedly generous, ascribing 45 acres to the Temple Mount surface, that would be a chance in a hundred million. So the new fangled religion comes and makes a claim on what is the most sacred site of the only city YHWH has ever referred to as His holy city. What a remarkably coincidence.
So, Satan has successfully co-opted and shanghaied the Temple Mount, putting its mosque there. Of the parties involved, with whom does the world’s sympathy go?
As Prime Minister of Israel, Netanyahu is so nice; gracious to homosexual and Muslim alike, though both are antithetical to the wellbeing of “the Israel of God.” Israel cannot be “the Israel of God” or “the true Israel” when the abominations of religious perversion and sexual perversion are—pardon the expression—courted by the State, welcomed into the very heart of Jerusalem herself. Occupying the Temple Mount itself, not to mention excluding all non-Muslims from the area. Not to slight an otherwise very good Prime Minister, but what an abysmal state Israel is in!
But also the answer to our question: Yes, Satan, having acted strategic zeal upon his keen, unwavering appetite, has his memorial in Jerusalem—many times over!
Mosque is like a wart. Israel is blighted with them, Jerusalem is beleaguered with them. Israel must and will reclaim the Temple Mount from Islam, but when?
Until then, Satan is certainly doing everything in his skillful power to parlay his memorial in Jerusalem into a portion and a right, as well.
Alas, I am WAY out of time. Enjoy the rough-cut read.
Martin D. Carlson
[1] Of course modern scholarship doesn’t believe that what we call 1 AD is the year Jesus was born. I was making a funny! The point is, after 4,000 years of prophecy, the Restorer, whose name is God With Us, came.
[2] STRONG DISCLAIMER: I am not labeling the Jews of Europe who suffered the Holocaust proud or wicked, but rather, as a race, Israel, guilty (of pride and wickedness) for its continual rejection of the Messiah is/was destined to reap fulfillment of this Scripture.
[3] See to it that before much time passes you read the autobiographical works of one or more Holocaust survivors. Read Wiesel, ten Boom, Frankl, Frank. (Anne Frank did not survive, but her diary inclusions are available through her father Otto Frank, who did.)
[4] After passing through arid places, Allah would seem to be all wet—really, really wet! I wonder, could he be that filthy horrid strain that Christ cast from the Gerasenes demoniac on the day he baptized all them pigs? You remember, the story of 50,000 Legions Beneath the Sea?
Tale Told 