Tag Archives: History

He Will Bless those Who Bless the Jews

As I said in my Sunday post, I recently read a book called Why are Jews Liberals?  by former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz. I found it fascinating and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in this area. I found it particularly fascinating where politics and religion intersect.

There were several things that prompted thought for me. As I said, Podhoretz briefly traces the history of the Jews throughout the church age — the time when the franchise for bringing God’s word to the world was shifted from the nation of Israel to the (mostly) Gentile Body of Christ. Instead of a particular nation that was tied to physical ancestry, the truth of Salvation is now disseminated through various gentile “client” nations where enough freedom exists for the gospel to be preached, and for people to believe freely and be able to gather together to study God’s word and grow in grace as believers. The church age is a time when, as Romans says, there is no Jew nor Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, but all (Believers) have equal privilege and opportunity as members of the Body of Christ.

The first client nation was the Roman Empire, where the early church flourished and eventually got distorted into a state religion. That religion dominated the middle ages and much of Western History thereafter and unfortunately some of its leaders had what I consider to be very odd ideas. Whereas the muslims were commanded in their koran to kill the Jews, and drive them out (if they could) Christians were not. But that didn’t mean they were to treat them well.

Indeed, according to Podhoretz, it was from St. Augustine that the notion of the Jews as a “witness people” began (though this is not obvious from a quick investigation through Google) (he did cite his reference but I didn’t make a note of it when I had the book). That is, the Jews were destined “to live as testimony to both evil and Christian truth, but were not to be killed, for like Cain they bore a sign.(14) ‘Let them live among us, but let them suffer and be continually humiliated’. In obedience to this concept, then, the Catholic Christians of Western Europe gathered Jews into “ghettos”, not to kill them, but not to give them any opportunities either. Unless he converted to Christianity, the Jew had to wear specific types of clothing, was not allowed to attend school or hold any job but money lending. Their misery was said to be the proof that Christianity was true.

Eeerch! Say WHAT?!!

Their misery would be proof that Christianity is true? What a concept! I would think that the proof that Christianity is true lies with the Bible. And only that. The idea that the God of all grace would need to deliberately use someone’s misery to prove the truth of His word just strikes me as … wrong. 

And what about Genesis 12:3 “And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

The fulfillment of that promise is played out starkly in Podhoretz’s narrative. And I’m happy to say that it was the United States that ultimately provided the greatest freedom — and prosperity — the Jews experienced in all their history since the fall of Jerusalem. It’s amazing the number of European Jewish immigrants who came here virtually penniless, were quickly employed — often self-employed — worked their butts off and ended up some of the wealthiest people in our country.

Just think: Levi’s began with a Jew (Levi Strauss). Sears, Levy’s Department Store, Goldwater’s, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Goldman-Sachs, Calvin Klein, Costco, Starbucks … okay so some of those are current. It’s amazing how many of them are in Hollywood… amazing how many things we take for granted, that are pleasures and blessings of life that have come from Jews in this country.

But then, the greatest blessing of all comes from a Jew as well, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who, of course was the one mostly being pointed to in God’s promise that in or through Abraham all the families of the earth should be blessed.

Global Warming and the Ten Plagues

Oh. My. Goodness….

The latest from the Global warming front…

Scientists have ascertained that the ten plagues of the Exodus which occurred, oh, about 3500 years ago, had nothing to do with God but were the product of a volcano and… you guessed it… Global Warming.

ROTFL

Surely they are kidding. They’ve got to be kidding. The Nile turned to blood? Caused by climate change? Why, yes, of course… The warm dry weather, they say, caused the river to become a slow-moving muddy watercourse, which in turn encouraged the growth of toxic freshwater algae called Burgundy blood algae. The toxic algae overstressed the frogs causing them to grow suddenly to adulthood, and leave the waters of the Nile all at once. Then as they died, they drew flies and mosquitoes and lice, which, as known disease vectors led to sick cattle and boils in people (why not boils in the cattle and sick people?) Meanwhile, 400 miles away, a volcano erupted accounting for the plagues of hail, locusts and darkness.

Unfortunately, all this conjecturing is based on a dry spell and volcano that occurred/erupted around 3000 years ago, during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between 1279 BC and 1213 BC. Which is the dating for the Exodus accepted by those who don’t think the Bible is inerrant. I opt for the 1446 BC dating accepted by those who do think the Bible is inerrant. I Kings 6:1 says the Temple was begun 480 years after the Exodus. Since we know the Temple was started in 966 BC, that puts the Exodus at 1446 BC . There’s also the perhaps too subtle clue in the fact that the Pharoah’s name at that time was not Ramses, but…ahem… Thutmose. Or Thutmosis, as it is alternatively spelled. Mose, Mosis, Moses…

Thutmose I was the father of Hatshepsut and also, by a “minor wife,” the father of Thutmose II, who became the “fully royal” Hatshepsut’s consort. This half-brother/half-sister pair had a daughter Neferure.Thutmose II also fathered a son, Thutmose III, by his own lesser wife, though DNA analysis indicates Thut 3 was not actually the son of Thut 2, so the lesser wife must have been fooling around… And most likely “the fully royal” wife Hatshepsut knew it.

Thus it seems to me that Hatshepsut was most likely the Pharoah’s daughter mentioned in Exodus. She doesn’t seem to have been terribly happy about being married to Thutmose II, and seems to have been the real power behind his reign. Wikipedia says that Thutmose III “would have succeeded as the only male heir under typical circumstances. [He] was born to a secondary wife or concubine of [his]father and was a youth at the time of his father’s death.[2] After the death of their father, a marriage between Neferure and her half-brother would have assured his place in the royal succession, but events led to his becoming only a co-regent for a long time before he became pharaoh.” Thutmose III was probably the Pharoah that Moses ran away from after killing the Egyptian who’d been beating a Hebrew.

Wikipedia doesn’t say what the events that led to Thut 3 being co-regent, but I think the story in Exodus where Pharoah’s daughter finds baby Moses and takes him in as her own makes sense when considered in light of the events outlined above. In Hebrews, we’re told that Moses, “by faith, when he had grown up refused to be called the son of Pharoah’s daughter…” that is, he was being groomed to be her successor, most likely to marry Neferure so that the false son of Thut 2 would never ascend to the throne…

None of which has anything to do with the Global warming theory, but IS interesting. And, as I said earlier, supports the 1446 BC dating of the Exodus. Which is NOT when the scientists’ volcano erupted.

Oh, and the deaths of the first-born? Fungus in the grain. The first-born males would have had first pickings, say the scientists, and thus died first — instantly, I would guess, if they were to save those who ate after them. I’m not sure if the first-born of the cattle would fall under this first pickings rule, either, so this supposed evidence is even more lame than the rest. Especially since none of the Jews who put the blood on their doorposts sustained any losses. How was it the slaves got the unfungus-infected grain and the royals did not?

Why do people have to tie themselves into knots in order to not believe that the Bible is true and that God can do miracles? They put on this facade of objectivity and intelligence and open-mindedness, and come up with the most convoluted, laborious and ultimately absurd explanations full of coincidences and challenging their own laws of statistics and then expect other people to be impressed. Well, of course, I know why: “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God…”

If you want to read the article itself, it’s here.

The New Royalty

The other day I was reading an essay by Victor Davis Hanson wherein he addressed the question: Why do our wealthy, liberal elite love a tax-happy, environmentally-expensive Obama? “The Discreet Charm of the Left-wing Plutocracy”, posted 11/9/09 suggests it’s a number of things, more prominently penance and big money.

In the essay, he cites Al Gore, Michael Moore, John Edwards, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi and others as the liberal elites, all of whom have a great deal of money and live like it. As Hanson pointed out, the billions Al Gore has made from his the carbon offsets business, designed to give hope to the fearful and to assuage the consciences of the guilty, fear and guilt being the result of his incessant sky is falling, global warming claims, have given him the ability to live a life quite at odds with the lifestyle he urges upon others. While we should be restricted to solar-powered, 1000 square foot homes, ride bicycles and take trains for longer journeys, Gore supports a mansion and a fleet of airplanes to jet him about the country. Michael Moore, John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Sean Penn and the Kennedy Dynasty share similar contradictory lifestyles. As I read of their mansions, their limousines, their jets, their jewels and clothing, their nightlife and overall high level of living juxtaposed against a rhetoric that supposedly identifies them with the poor and downtrodden — all the while disdaining “commoners” like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plummer, it occurred to me that these people are America’s version of Old World royalty.

They do whatever they want, and regard it as a given that those who are under their rule should have no say. They only have to pay their taxes, or as in olden times, their tribute and their fealty. The new royalty, who live like kings and lords of old, are justified in doing so because they are so concerned with helping the little people, the unwashed masses they want nothing to do with in the practical. Thus, a king or lord had the right to use his money to build a bunch of expensive gardens, amass an expensive collection fine art produced by the artist his court has sponsored, to go about in gold-gilt carriages with an entourage of similarly outfitted “noblemen” and who of the serfs had any right to criticize. He is the king or the lord. They are serfs. They have no rights; they have only to pay what is due.

This is what our forefathers left England to escape. They came here to be free of confiscatory taxation, taxation without representation, deals cut out of the public eye, in the salons of the wealthy and the so-called noble. Our forefathers came here to build a new nation that was not beholden to royalty, where no man was considered better than another simply because of his birth. Kings were no better, no smarter, no more deserving of respect than commoners. All were equal before the law. So it was no wonder that our first President, George Washington refused to bow to foreign royalty, a tradition continued by all presidents which followed him. Except one.

If you’d like to read Hanson’s essay, it’s here.