Israel, Palestine, and an Angry God

Most of you who read this know me and, therefore, know that I was a minister for most of my career. I took great interest in the Bible in high school and took seriously the task of reading the entire Bible, even the weird laws and exhausting lists of who’s father was whose. Then I spent four years studying to be a youth pastor. In that time I continued my reading, by then going through the Bible a second time. Then I spent 17 years in full-time capacities as youth pastor assistant pastor, ministry professor, and other related titles. And I continued my readings of the scriptures from Genesis to the maps.

It’s an experience I’ve always enjoyed and treasured. If you have any interest in the Bible, there is nothing better than getting the whole picture. When I was in North Carolina, four years into my career, I read an article by a Jewish scholar who lamented the addition of chapter and verse numbers in the Bible. The scriptures didn’t always have those. He said it took away from getting the real message and meaning of God’s Word. Getting this wide angle view of the Bible then became even more real for me in 2005 when I first started teaching “Biblical Literature I & II.” These were courses that went through the entire Old and New Testaments (respectively) in just a little over 3 months. By then I’d done studies of single books, chapters, and passages, which were great; but, nothing was better than focusing on the whole Bible as one.

My continual reading of the Bible over the years hadn’t made me an expert, of course. But one thing I learned from my college training and interactions with colleagues over the years is the importance of observing repetition in the Bible. Things that come up over and over are important. We call them themes. And ever since I was in high school I took notice that the Old Testament—even the New—stated many times that Israel was God’s people. It is a theme that can be summed up this way: “You mess with God’s people, you mess with God. And, it’s all there in the Bible. He unleashed horrific wrath on nations who oppressed or persecuted his people. It was a theme not lost on me, even at 17 years old.

But there was another theme that was pretty hard to miss. One that I tend to forget and I believe I’m not alone. I would even go so far as to say that this theme seemed to show up more than the previous, and it is this: Israel better not mess with God either.

Though the nations may be in trouble for hurting God’s people, they may or may not get it as bad as Israel themselves when they are the ones doing the hurting. I would even say that this was an ever more prominent theme. The Bible is very clear on its evaluation of the people’s and their rulers’ behaviours.

Most of it is damning. Literally. The horrors that Israel went through at God’s behest is the stuff of nightmares. Most of the kings of Israel and Judah were deemed evil in the eyes of God, many getting what God said was coming to them. For one of them it was to be slaughtered with wild dogs lapping up his blood in a field that he stole from someone.

If all you’re looking for in the Bible are heartwarming stories like Daniel in the lion’s den, David vs Goliath, or Jesus performing miracles, you should avoid reading the Prophets. Actually avoid most of the Old Testament. And quite a few of Paul’s letters to churches. Peter’s and John’s too.

No, Israel doesn’t get an automatic immunity hall pass. Yes, Hamas killed almost 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians. And they took 251 hostages. That does sound pretty evil to me, but I’m not getting into who is/was right in this conflict from the beginning to now. But I can say that 17-year-old me would be as troubled as 53-year-old me at what the state of Israel (not the people, the government) has done in response. They have killed over 60,000 Palestinians (half of them women and children) and are currently starving the people out.

This brings me to one final theme I noticed when reading the Bible as one book. This theme was bigger than the previously two discussed above: 

Care for the poor and afflicted.

Over and over and over in the middle of the Bible’s war stories, its instructions for farming, its listing of families, its strange laws—in the middle of everything—I would see God telling his people to not forget widows, orphans, foreigners, the sick, and those who are without. I can’t state enough how big this theme is in the Bible. Jesus himself said that his followers were serving him when they served people who were poor and downtrodden. And James defined “pure and undefiled” religion as visiting “fatherless and widows in their affliction.”

I don’t share this to be conspicuously relevant. This being a major theme in the Bible is literally something I noticed as a teenager and have talked about it with my wife and close friends over the past decades. Little did I know how hard this would hit me in 2025.

When I think of Netanyahu and the current Israeli administration, I fear for them. God may have called Israel “his people,” but he’s also made it clear that his love is for all of humanity. His children are all the people of the world. You crush the weak and justify yourself, you’re messing with God himself.

Today we see pictures of children starving to death that bring back memories of famines in African countries like Ethiopia in the late 70’s and early 80’s. The situation in Gaza is up there with every other atrocity done to humanity in all history.

But for some reason, if the people aren’t North American, European, or Israeli, we don’t seem to be as bothered by calamity. When I was graduating from college in 1994, there was a genocide in Africa that saw 600,000 to 800,000 brutal deaths. That’s 250 times more than that of 9/11. Women and children were literally being hacked to death in the streets just for being who they were, and most of us didn’t even know it was going on. Sometimes I wonder how complicit we all are: we who sit comfortably with our coffees clicking our tongues and shaking our heads about “all the crazy stuff going on over there.” God have mercy on us.