Judah and Israel by S Frey

Been doing lots of reading, also visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC this summer. The museum is a must see.

Just recently I located a copy of "Judah and Israel: or the Restoration and Conversion of the Jews and the Ten Tribes" by Joseph Samuel C.F.Frey, published in 1840. This book is important because Rev Frey was one of the early modern Jewish converts from Judaism to Christianity. He retained clear ties to his Jewish past, but reflected a growing Christian prophetic awareness that the time for Israel as a people to be restored to the land of Israel.

He was active in missionary work towards his fellow Jews because of his firm belief that their conversion would be the means by which God would restore his people to the land and save them. This reasoning is based on the premise that God will not return his favor to the Jewish people until they believe as Christians do. This clearly implies that Jews are not in a saving relationship to God at present and need to become Christians before God will restore the nation as promised in the "old" testament prophets. This is another example of replacement theology that denies Israel any saving relationship with the God of Israel, but note that the prophets say no such thing. The prophets of old are uniform in their statements that the people of Israel return to him, return to the land when he calls them and repent of their sins under the long existing Sinaitic covanent.

Even though Christians often interpret and translate Zechariah 12 where "they look upon me whom they have pierced and mourn for him" as a reference to God's messiah Jesus Christ, I think it is perfectly plausible to retain the reference of the one pierced being God himself, the father, he is the God of Israel. Israel of old made errors and sinned in ways that Jews themselves today recognize without Christians pointing them out in great detail. Invoking trinitarian references to God in the flesh as Jesus, hence piercing "me" in Jesus physical death in 33 AD adds several layers of exegetical speculation that have no place in Zechariah's original prophecy.

God will save Israel, he doesn't need modern messianic Jews, he doesn't need Christian missionary conferences and major evanglization efforts. I submit that these are actually harmful to the modern state of Israel, they are disruptive of the fragile identity of Jews in their own country. It is simply another Christian effort at saving those poor blind Jews. But this is wrong.

2 other references on this subject are worth looking at:
Ernest Sandeen - The Roots of Fundamentalism. Written in the 70's I think.
Yaakov Ariel - Evangelizing the Chosen People. Missions to the Jews in America, 1880-2000. Published in 2000 by University of North Carolina Press.




Coming soon:
1 Current Iranian threats against Israel.
2. The recent conflict in Lebanon with Hizbollah.
3. The Islamisation of The European Union. How that is weakening the West.
4. Appeasement efforts in the middle east. The parallels with Hitler's Nazi Germany in 1938.
5. Islamic eschatology and how it counterpoints Biblical prophecy concerning Israel and the nations.
6. The protocols of the elders of Zion. The biggest lie of the 20th century.