Israel and the Church: One People or Two? Covenant Theology And Dispensationalism

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[00:00:00] Is covenant theology a secondary issue, or is it primary to a proper understanding of scripture and how to apply scripture today? That is something that I think is undergirding the conversation I had on the Libertarian Christians podcast back on episode four 18, if I have that right, of the main flagship podcast of our Christians for Liberty network, which of course I go recommend to do.

Make quite a few appearances on our flagship show, and there are of course other shows in our Christians for Liberty network. You can check out at Christians for lib liberty.net. In the episode four 18, which I’m referencing, I was on for a rather unique episode. This was one of the most unique conversations I was ever a part of, and it was with host Cody Cook.

You guys should know. Well. He is my arch nemesis at lc High, the punching Anna Baptist and also. A guest, someone who I had never met before until this conversation. His name was Chris Todd. He is a pastor and a missionary and a licensed psychologist or, or counselor who offers therapeutic counseling services in the Middle East.

That’s where he is stationed and he is often helping people to sort of deal with the traumas of war and famine and. Just the different cultural and political challenges that face people over in the Middle East. I think he’s more specifically stationed in Lebanon, but he’s, I think, been to other places in the region as well, and even attended churches that were bombed by the IDF.

And of course, so this conversation sort of has two parts, and I’m gonna have a timestamp here. If some of you wanna get to the meat of the theology part, you can jump to the timestamp in the description. I do highly recommend if you haven’t listened to this conversation already, listening to the entire conversation, because I do think rounding it in Chris’s lived experience to kind of use the left’s [00:02:00] talking points here is sort of useful and helpful.

Chris is someone who went there with a certain belief about. Israel, the nation and, and, and politics and, and living there on the ground certainly shifted his perspective. And so understanding political realities and, and looking into the history of things, the history of the state of Israel and their relationship to not just the Palestinians, but all of their Arab navels arid to all of their Arab neighbors is of course important to understanding the situation there.

But equally important and perhaps more important. Is being grounded in an understanding of covenant theology and what the different covenants of the Bible are, what they teach, how they interact with one another, and what sort of eternal implications do these different covenants have. And to a lesser degree, and this comes up, it’s not the same, but it is somewhat useful to think about also what are the eschatological.

Component to these covenants as well. For those of you who are watching on the video side, after this intro plays, you’re not gonna have any normal video of me because this conversation, because we were recording with someone who was overseas, the internet couldn’t support a video recording. What I have gone ahead and done is for the first section, just included some images and some text about what’s being said.

Images of, of Chris and his ministry and of the different regions that he’s from and sort of the challenges and, you know, some, not overly graphic, but just general depictions of conflict and, and war and the devastation that happened over there in the Middle East. And then when it kicks over the part of the conversation that I have time stamp below to the theology talk, I tried to include some graphics, some of which I made my own, some of which I borrowed from.

From the internet, one that I borrow from Redeemed Zoomer, who I I like his channel and I thought he [00:04:00] did. He’s made one of the best graphs depicting covenant theology that I’ve ever seen. So I, I, I tend to steal his a lot, which he has said he is fine with people using his, his work in that way. And but I like to give him credit for that image.

But I also made an image on dispensationalism and sort of the covenantal and timeline archeological. Views of dispensationalism and how they compare and contrast. And on one hand, you know, while I was doing this, when I was making the dispensational graphs and, and going over the timelines, how the covenants align and the, the sort of views of en routes of salvation.

Yeah. There’s part of me that goes like, you know, this is kind of fun, right? Like, I understand a little bit of the impulse of maybe people. Still to this day try to predict when the rapture is going to be. But, but Dispensationalist, if you’ve seen, you know, videos of people with, with like those huge you know, graphs, timelines behind them that have arrows and different shaded parts and it’s like all over the place.

And you know what, like there’s something to that, not because I think it’s true, but I think that we as humans like to solve puzzles and sometimes we wanna think that scripture. It’s like this complex equation, right? Like, it’s almost like national treasure. And there’s these, there’s these the, the movie National Treasure and there’s like these, these hidden code exes and hidden nuggets of wisdom and, and there’s like numerology and, and things that indicate different ways in which we can predict the future or understand God’s God’s plan.

And yet I think that. Covenant theology has sometimes said, well, it’s, Hey, it’s over spiritualizing. Maybe the underlying allegation there is it’s oversimplifying scripture. I think that the gospel message is both incredibly above us. Incredibly like just, just so striking and so deep that it’s hard to put to words, and yet it is, I think so simple and I think the way it unfolds in, [00:06:00] in the Bible when we, we look at it.

In the New Testament and the Old Testament, when looking back through a Christ Christological lens, we see that it is simple. It’s about God’s story of redemption unfolding through different times as God yields with different people, all culminating in his ultimate redemptive work in the God man Jesus Christ.

And so. What theology is more God honoring and serving, and what theology is more man serving and flesh serving? I’ll leave you to decide, but that’s enough I think framing for this episode. I do hope that you video enjoyers and video listeners enjoy. What, what I’ve done. If you on the video side, if you like this show if you like this episode, please like it, please subscribe for future content.

Comment. Let me know what you thought. Let me know where you agree. Let me know where you disagree. I always enjoy interacting with you in the, in the, in the YouTube sphere and. Of course those of you who are on the audio side, I will have my images and graphs for you on the episode show notes page.

Just go to biblical anarchy podcast.com. I then click on the episode. For this bonus episode, and then you will have access to view these graphs and whatnot and understand more of what I’m trying to describe. And of course for you, for those of you on the audio side as well, I would just, I’d like to bug you guys too much about this because I honestly just enjoy.

Doing my job here, but I want more people to be able to be part of this conversation. And so from the audio side, five star reviews, especially written reviews, if you could do so on the Apple Podcast side. And I don’t think Spotify lost duty written reviews, but if it does, go ahead and do it. Those help tremendously with boosting this podcast in the rankings.

So it gets recommended more. And of course, if you wanna support the show. Support what I do. I would love to be able to make more of this content. You can [00:08:00] go to libertarian christians.com/donate, and if you want to, you can sign up for $10 or more a month and become an LCIM sider, which gives you all sorts of perks and so all sorts of goodies that you can use for your continuing studies and journey.

In understanding the relationship between faith and politics. With that said, I’m going to now switch over to Cody as he introduces this conversation for us.

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[00:08:27] Narrator: You’re

[00:08:27] Cody Cook: listening to the Libertarian Christian Podcast, a project of the Libertarian Christian Institute, and a member of the Christians for Liberty Network.

My guests today are Jacob Win grad, whom you probably know. He’s an LCI, regular and a host of the Biblical Anarchy Podcast and Chris talk, and instead of me trying to summarize what you do for a living, Chris, maybe you can just kind of tell me what you do and how you got to where you are. You’re not in America right now, right?

[00:08:50] Chris Todd: I am not in America. So what I do is I’m a missionary, so I’m here actually working in the Middle East, sharing the gospel with people. The way that I do that primarily these days is through trauma therapy. So we actually have a clinic where we offer healing in the name of Jesus, and we use clinical techniques for people who have PTSD and anxiety and depression.

And we have really seen the healing work of Jesus, the power of the Holy Spirit at work and ministry, and how people’s lives are changed. And once they experience that healing, they are drawn to the person of Jesus. And as far as that in itself is another interesting story. But my wife and I had been doing short term missions in Guatemala for years, and we decided that the Lord had called us to the Middle East.

I felt the call before she did, but we knew that we wanted to be full-time missionaries. And so we actually started raising funds from independent churches and organizations, mostly in North Alabama. And the Lord brought all of our funding together and got us here. We came in January of 2012, started working in Beirut and then moved to tire soon after that.

[00:09:56] Cody Cook: So. Not having been out of the country yet. When we [00:10:00] sort of hear about trauma therapy in Middle East, I mean, I, I’m assuming that the, the kinds of experiences that people have over there may be, in some cases more dramatic than the kind of things we would experience here in the United States for the most part.

I mean, is that a safe assumption for me to have? Are we talking about people who’ve experienced war in its aftermath and that kind of thing? Or are you dealing with stuff that’s kind of more personal, like kind of relationship trauma? What kind of stuff do you deal with?

[00:10:23] Chris Todd: That’s a great question because a lot of times as Americans, we feel like our country is safer than other countries, when really we just have a different set of dangers.

So in the states, I would be dealing a lot more with people who’d suffered a personal injury from, maybe from a family member or a relationship or a situation. We deal almost completely with war trauma. So these are people who were fleeing from bombing. In many cases, their homes were destroyed as they were fleeing from them.

I’ll just tell you a couple of stories real quick to give you an idea of who we’re dealing with. One young girl, she was five years old. Her father and her uncles were actually captured by the secret police in their home at night, beaten in front of her and dragged away as she was screaming for them to not take her dad.

So for a long time she was afraid of the dark. She was afraid of men in uniform, afraid of men in general, afraid of cars ’cause she saw her dad put in a car. So it was hard for her to function in normal life. She couldn’t do things like go to school ‘ cause that involved all of the things she was afraid of, and in some way or other, we were able to help her find healing in the name of Jesus.

She just finished her exams to finish the ninth grade. So praise God for that. It’s a great story of healing in her life. We had another family that the husband was actually here trying to, he had come ahead to try to find a place to bring his family. To get them out of Syria during the war. And they were staying in a village and the regime started shelling their house.

And in Syrian culture, people have animals outside of their house normally either in [00:12:00] the the front yard or it’s very common to have a little garden right out the front door that has some animals in it. The animals were killed and the family had to run through like this bloody of their family pets and just horrible trauma that they had to go through.

So we deal with a lot of stuff like that. We don’t actually see as much things like criminal violence or rape or street gang violence or family violence. That’s actually a lot less common in Middle Eastern culture than it is in American culture. So I would say, not that people here are more traumatized, but they are traumatized in different ways.

And because of the scale of war that we have now, there are a lot more traumatized people. But trauma can affect people no matter what the source of it. That may be more answer than you wanted, but you ask a trauma therapist to talk and there you go.

[00:12:51] Cody Cook: No, I, I’m actually, maybe I have one more question related to the trauma therapy thing, which is I think there’s an assumption that probably a lot of Americans have that people you know overseas who experience that kind of stuff are maybe made of tougher stuff that they just kind of cope and deal with that stuff and grin and bear it and move forward.

I mean, do you, I mean, in your experience, do you see that, I mean, humans are sort of fragile everywhere you go and deal with some of the same responses to trauma?

[00:13:17] Chris Todd: Yeah, we’re all made of the same stuff. Don’t let anybody tell you that other people are made of tougher stuff and they’re just gonna make it through.

Nope. We’re all made of the same stuff and our body is not very good at discerning what responses it should consider traumatic. So a person who is going down the street and gets in a car wreck has suffered a trauma in the same way. A person who is fleeing from a building that got bombed, has suffered a trauma.

Those two things can impact the body in the same way, because our body only really has one response to trauma, one response network, our sympathetic nervous system, and it activates the same things no matter what the thing is that scared us. When you get into complex [00:14:00] trauma where people are traumatized over and over again for years, then the story gets a lot more complicated.

But people who are overseas are not continuing to survive because they are made of tougher stuff. They’re continuing to survive because we as humans have been given this desire to live on and to make it through, and even no matter how hurt we are and how suffering we are, some people just managed to make it through.

But not all of them do. We, I’ll tell you another story. We see some people who are really broken. We had a man who had been in prison in Syria. For 12 years, and he had been in and out of prison. He was in prison the last time for a year and a half. When he got outta prison, they had tortured him so badly and put him through so much.

He had forgotten his own name. He could only remember his prisoner number, his cell number. So when his family claimed him, he didn’t know who he was, nor who they were. And we’re meeting with this family and this man trying to help them go through the most simple things of getting back to life. How do you get somebody back to their normal life when they started out not even knowing who they were anymore.

So there are some pretty bad tales of things. People have made it through, but they didn’t make it through it. Okay. I guess that’s how I would answer your question is don’t assume that because they’re still walking and breathing, they’re okay. They are not okay. They are broken.

[00:15:25] Cody Cook: Well, I wanna shift a little bit.

I think that’s kind of helpful to start with since you kind of remember that we’re talking about human beings here, but. I’m thinking about this, the Israel-Palestine conflict and how difficult it is over here sometimes to sort it out because there’s so many narratives and stories about who’s good and who’s bad.

And I’m assuming because you’re much closer to that conflict than we are, you probably see it differently that your understanding of it is shaped by your proximity to it. And maybe not to mention the conversations that you’ve I’m sure had with Christian Muslim neighbors. So American evangelicalism I think, has a tendency sometimes to see the contemporary nation of [00:16:00] Israel as protected by God.

And we believe that we as Christians have an obligation to support whatever they do. And so I’m curious, was that your perspective when you were in the United States, and do you now see it differently as a result of your proximity to it? Or in other words, are you team Israel or Team Palestine?

[00:16:16] Chris Todd: I am team Jesus, my brother.

That’s who I’m with. I am team Jesus. And my answer will reflect team Jesus and my desire for everyone to be on his team. I would say that one of my board members said it best because I have talked a lot about what’s happening here. I feel like Americans don’t get the whole story, they don’t even get a piece of the story.

So it’s definitely opened my perspective and made me more informed, but being here so close to it, but to people, we’re telling him, Chris has talking about Israel bombing him, and we’re just not okay with that. And my board member said, well, when people are bombing you, it gives you a different perspective on them.

So I would hope that we as followers of Jesus would be offended by all evil and all violence. And you’re probably looking for more answer, but I was gonna give you a chance to cut me off. So here’s what I would say. As someone who lives in the region and has worked in the region, the events that happened on October 7th, 2023 were horrible.

It was murder o over 1100 Israelis were murdered by Hamas. And what Hamas did was a terrorist act, the terrorist organization, and nothing. Excuses, that kind of violent terror. People who have studied the history of Palestine and the history of Israel will look at my statement and go, well, you’re not excusing it, are you?

There’s, I can tell you this. When you’ve taken everything that a people have and you’ve locked them in a, in an open air prison, you have to expect something to happen. What did you think would happen? Something was gonna happen and it did. That doesn’t make it okay. It never makes it okay for violence and terror to happen like that, but we should understand that something was going to [00:18:00] happen.

[00:18:00] Jacob Winograd: Well, just on that note, Chris, an example in history that’s close to us Americans, I like to bring up, which I think illustrates your point, is the Nat Turner Revolt. And this was in 1831 and it was basically a slave revolt. Nat Turner was a enslaved preacher, and when this. Revolt happened and broke out.

They didn’t just go after their slave holders, but they went on on a killing spree and they were killing a bunch of white civilians in the surrounding region. Not quite to the same scale as the October 7th Hamas attack. But the abolitionists at the time, they didn’t exactly when this revolt happened.

They weren’t celebrating the deaths of the white people and they weren’t saying, this is good. But it was kind of in the same line of thinking that you said that was like, well, what did you expect to happen when you have held a certain group of people in perpetual prison or enslavement for so long?

There’s only so long that can go on without consequence. And so it’s not about justification, it’s about understanding sort of predictable blowback.

[00:19:07] Cody Cook: Yeah, the blowback word is important. And since we’re the Libertarian Christian Podcast, that’s a word that we like to use a lot that I think probably Ron Paul introduced most of us too.

Which is this idea that you can’t really intervene in other people’s lives and ex and not expect certain negative repercussions. Now, are they necessarily, does that mean the negative repercussions are justified or even proportional? No, but you, if you understand the way human beings work, you’re gonna understand that’s a likely, a likely thing to happen.

But I think, you know what a lot of people would say, Chris, is that Israel is in a loose situation, right? I mean, if they don’t fight back, they’re gonna be destroyed. But by people who hate them, maybe pathologically hate them, people who want them destroyed, but if they do fight back, then they’re gonna look like bullies on the world stage.

So, I mean, isn’t Israel in a loose situation is, I mean, is there not really a path forward for Israel to create long-term peace and security for everyone in the region? Or is it just gonna just be a bloody battle to survive every [00:20:00] single day?

[00:20:00] Chris Todd: I think that people who are looking at the situation from the outside could easily see that.

I’ve heard that statement made that if Israel stopped, resist that, that if Palestinians stopped resisting. Today there’d be peace forever. And if Israel stopped resisting, there’d be no more Israel. People say that all the time. Here’s the thing, Israel has committed daily violence on the Palestinians since 1948.

There has never been a time when Israel did not inflict violence on Palestinians. And most people don’t know that. Before the 1948 War broke out the Israeli militias, they had a plan called Planned and, and Planned LA was their plan for all the things they were gonna take that were supposed to belong to the Palestinians under the peace plan before they declared the nation of Israel.

And so you can actually go back and I encourage you to go back and to actually read some of the stuffs that’s been written. Ilan Poppe, who is a Jewish Israeli historian, wrote a great book called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and he actually went into the archives. Documented all this stuff. So I’m not making any of this stuff.

The, these are Israeli sources that are reporting this. They actually went in and they had accomplished all the goals of Planned LA before the 1948 war broke out. Israel had already ethnically cleansed many Palestinian areas. So when I say that there’s not been a day since the formation of the nation, that they’ve not inflicted violence on the Palestinians.

I’m not talking crap. I’m actually stating documented history. So I would encourage the nation of Israel to try the path of peace because they’ve never tried it before.

[00:21:44] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. I think of the dilemma you’re speaking of, Cody. To kind of piggyback off of what Chris is saying, there’s a famous letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Holmes and it with addressing, I guess like thing things going on with the question of slavery in the [00:22:00] newly formed alliance of the colonies.

And new United States and what to do with the question of slavery and, and the phrasing he used is that we have the wolf by the ear and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale and self preservation in the other. Basically highlighting that there is sort of this lose loose situation that well, if we keep on enslaving them, that’s going to obviously lead to negative consequences and it’s not justified.

But if we just let them go, what kind of are they gonna retaliate? And I think it’s just like we have to recognize the problem of sin and that there is no perfect solution there. Where if you stop as a nation or a government or a group of people, if you stop committing evil, that doesn’t mean that you’re then free from the consequences of that evil that’s gone on for years, or in this case, decades and generations.

And we can say that we don’t want those negative consequences to happen and that even they’re not justified if they. If those consequences go, a, you go after ne innocent people, but it doesn’t justify continuing that status quo of, well, we just have to keep them in perpetual, in, in enslavement or in this case, perpetual, essentially a perpetual apartheid.

And yeah, I mean, this is not the podcast probably to do a deep dive on history, but yeah, I mean, Chris brought up a, an example very close to 1948, and really just if you study the history of Zionism, going back even to the, the late 18 hundreds, there were some in the early Zionist movement who wanted to peacefully coexist with the Arabs.

But it’s just a, it’s just a fact that some of the most prominent radical Zionists, which ended up being the ones who were really in control of things by the time you get to the 1940s, they were very public in their very open, in their writings, and then eventually very public about their intention that we have no desire to have a shared secular state with the Arabs We’re going to.

Through whatever means possible, kick [00:24:00] them out and have a Jewish ex excl exclusivist state. And I say that as someone who was born to a Jewish family, and I very much indoctrinated in the Zionist pro-Israel perspective on that history. And I’ve heard that, and propaganda can cut both ways, but I think that there are certainly things like Chris’s sort of urging Christians to look into.

I would echo that same urging, that it’s important to really just sort of dispassionately, go look at the history and you can find wrongdoing on both sides. And you can even find yourself sympathizing with both sides if you really do an honest reading of the history. I think.

[00:24:38] Cody Cook: It is kind of ironic. It seems that so many of the, those folks, the kind of strong Zionists who were, you know what?

Get rid of the people who were there were secular. The Zionist movement was a progressive Jewish movement and not a religious one. They sort of saw themselves as Moses and Joshua coming in to clean out the Canaanites. You could understand maybe the rationale there. That is very strange that it was a very kind of western secular movement.

Chris supporters of Israel do often argue that Israel goes above and beyond to save lives when they strike back against terrorist attacks by Hamas. But a lot of critics aren’t so sure. I mean, what are the impressions on the ground when you talk to people about what Israel’s doing? Do you feel like people have a sense that Israel’s doing their best to avoid bloodshed or not?

[00:25:17] Chris Todd: I think that Israel has been really good at publicizing the times when they do, and really good at making sure the times when they don’t get made public. I can say that here in entire, they did say, Hey, all of you need to evacuate the entire city and go to the north of Lebanon. They did that before the intensive bombing of tire.

It’s a pretty big deal to, to evacuate an entire city, bomb it. And the Iranians did the same thing. They told the people in Tel Aviv, all of you need to get outta Tel Aviv, we’re gonna bomb it. So is that really giving warning to someone if the Iranians and the Israelis are, are really using the same tactic, the thing where they would hit the top of a building with a warning [00:26:00] bomb.

They did that a few times, but that sort of stuff is long gone. They’ve bombed hospitals, they’ve bombed schools all over and over again. Churches have been bombed by the Israelis, and you don’t hear that in the American media. But churches where I have preached myself here in Lebanon have been bombed by the Israelis.

And so I don’t think that I would describe them as being careful to avoid casualties. I think they can be very precise and very careful when they want to be. And so, but I wanna turn the conversation back to Jesus. ’cause that’s our hope, right? Our hope is in Jesus. And I just wish that Americans would understand that Jesus has laid out a path of peace, and we should be praying for the Palestinians to follow it.

And we should be praying for the Israelis to follow that path of peace because the Israelis are only digging themselves in a deeper hole every year as they follow the path of violence. And if there’s time, I’d like to just offer a few thoughts on that. Is that okay? Sure, go right ahead. Okay. So the situation that Israel is in right now, demographically, is very dire for them.

My heart goes out to the Jewish people. I want to see them live in peace and prosperity. I don’t want to see them in danger, and I don’t want to see them lose that place of security and peace. But they’ve placed themselves in the country of Israel in an unworkable position. And the reason I say that is because demographically the number of Palestinians and what I would call the entire land of Israel, and the number of Jewish people are roughly the same.

There’s roughly the same number of Jews and Palestinians in what we would call Israel, west Bank and Gaza. There’s a lot more Palestinians outside of that who have never been allowed to come home and probably will never be allowed to come home. And so since those populations are equal, there’s really only three things that could happen.

The Israelis could create a viable Palestinian state [00:28:00] and move as mal many Palestinians into it as possible. That’s no longer possible. The Israelis have made that politically impossible by saying there will never be a two state solution. So then there has to be a one state solution. What does the one state solution look like?

Can they ethnically cleanse? Can they commit a genocide? Can they push all the Palestinians out of Israel and claim all of the land? I, I don’t know that they can do that in the modern world. Maybe they can. They’re certainly trying their hardest. The other solution is apartheid, right? To continue a one state solution where the Palestinians are as they are now in this continued state of subjugation to the Israeli nation, which is primarily a Jewish nation, although not completely.

And so neither of those are really a workable solution ’cause the Apartheid state continues to generate Palestinian response. And so if none of those options work, a one state solution where Jews become the minority in that state is a dangerous thing for them to consider. They don’t have any good options right now.

All of the options available to them are bad, and so out of all of them, I would urge them to take the one that’s a path of peace. If you see that all of your options are bad and they all are bad, ‘ cause violence has led them to where they’re at, please try peace.

[00:29:18] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, I think, well, I just wanted to say really quick.

I, I, I agree with that so much. I think that bringing it back to Jesus, I think from the Christian perspective is important because I think for some reason the Evangelicals and Christians in, in, in America, often we are approaching this as we can have discussions about geopolitics, foreign policy and things like that from different perspectives.

And I think even just on reason alone, you can come away with certain conclusions and criticize certain positions, but even if you want to debate, that’s very nuanced. And you come away with a different, maybe you can argue for a different perspective that we shouldn’t be. There’s almost [00:30:00] this like underlying assumption that I see in some Christians where they’re not approaching it in terms of viewing Israeli children and Palestinian children as being on the same playing field as like we should be praying as Christians, that our heart matches the father’s heart, and that these are both groups of children in need of the gospel and that are the least of these that we should be advocating for.

Insofar as both are in situations that are precarious, where their lives and their liberties are in danger. And as Christians, we should be trying to cut through the history and the geopolitics are important, but we should be trying to cut through that to show the better way, as you said, Chris, which is living for Christ as individuals and as communities.

[00:30:45] Cody Cook: And just outta question of clarification, which is I, as an Anabaptist, of course, I love all the stuff about peace and following Jesus, but, but as you mentioned, it’s a precarious situation and a lot of these people are not Christians. And so, I mean, what, what practically does it look like for Israel to pursue peace?

So what are some pragmatic steps that could be taken there? Maybe not even pragmatic steps? What are just the steps?

[00:31:07] Jacob Winograd: I think that fir first, like you, you’re not going to be able to, I mean, so if I’m gonna re co-opt to Thomas Jefferson’s analogy, you have to let the wolf go, right? Like you, you can no longer hold the wolf by the ear.

You can no longer hold the Palestinian people hostage. Now I think at this point it might not have seem politically viable to create a two-state solution, but something needs to happen where the Palestinian people are no longer at a situ. I think ideally what would happen. I don’t think that the Israeli government will pursue this, but ideally what should happen is that there should be one government for that people, which upholds the God-given rights of all individuals in question.

And then if there’s anyone on either side from any camp that continues to engage in violence, well then you would treat that like a [00:32:00] domestic terrorist situation and you would go after only those specifically which engage in in, in acts of violence against peaceful people and start to heal the generational trauma.

’cause otherwise, all you’re doing is continuing that generational trauma and ensuring either one of two outcomes, one outcome being that in 20 years we’re still in the same predicament, or the only rea, the only way that I could see besides what I’m proposing that they get out of this predicament is through.

Things getting even worse. And they entirely ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people either through complete displacement or even worse by essentially complete gen or nearly complete genocide. Even that all that would do would be to quote unquote solve the Palestinian problem. It would not solve the hatred that the Jewish people in the region face from a lot of their Muslim and Arab brothers and sisters.

I, I think that would only continue to sow more generational violence and blow back from other parts of the Arab world. So yeah, I think that you have to pursue some kind of solution that stops that cycle. And then I agree with Chris, like I think Israel has shown that they can be precise when they want to be.

And I just like, it’s easy to say, well, they give warnings, but I mean, Gaza is very tiny. I mean, this is smaller than, I mean, I think Israel’s the size of New Jersey and Gaza’s even smaller than that. So. Like these people, if you see the pictures of of Gaza, you see how the roads are destroyed, the infrastructure’s gone.

It’s not like everyone has a car or roads that are intact that they can even drive on. And then you have to worry about the IDF and Hamas sometimes shooting people who are trying to just move about opening the streets. And then what if there’s wounded people and they cannot be easily moved, or elderly people who can’t be moved.

So yeah, the, the status quo can continue. My, my prayer is that they [00:34:00] would much like we here in America, had to get to a point with the Native Americans where we said, you know what, like we have done a lot of wrong here and we can’t easily in one fell swoop. Correct all that wrong. Same with the African Americans here.

But we, what we can do is at least take the first step towards long-term peace, which is we’re gonna stop the continuation of violence and enslavement and oppression and, and taking away of fundamental rights. And also Israel needs to allow. The international community and the Christian community to really come in there and actually start offering both like material and spiritual aid.

I think, because unfortunately the Israeli government has done a lot to keep need of both types out, I think. But I, I think Chris could probably provide more on that.

[00:34:44] Cody Cook: Yeah. And maybe before we move on to kind of theology more generally, I’d be interested in if, if Chris has any more thoughts on kinda the practical steps Israel could be taking before we move on to theological questions.

[00:34:54] Chris Todd: Yeah. I like all the stuff that Jacob said. Very insightful. I think that Israel will have to use a federal system. There are a number of countries in the Middle East who are divided ethnically and religiously. Syria and Iraq have both developed federal systems, which allow some degree of autonomy to different segments of the population, but still have one kind of united country and one central law.

I think there’s some promise in that possibly for the is for the nation of Israel. The issue really is going to be the land they’ve taken and giving that back. That’s gonna be a hard thing to do. That’s the main thing, stopping a two-state solution right now, if the Israelis would right now, and let’s not overestimate the hostility of the Arab neighbors to Israel.

All of the Arab neighbors of Israel are scrambling to make peace with Israel right now. And the Gulf countries are eager to establish normalized relations with Israel if only they can get some solution to this Palestinian problem. Jordan and Egypt, the two other countries bordering Israel, [00:36:00] have had peace with them since the seventies, so over 50 years of peace.

So let’s not overestimate the danger that Israel is in from its Arab neighbors. It is not in danger from its Arab neighbors. They’re in danger from their own internal political dysfunction. And so if they could adopt some kind of federal system that recognized the property rights of those whose property has been taken.

That property is still being taken. You can go on the internet and today, find videos of Palestinians going up to their home and saying to the Jewish settler who is living in their home, you’re stealing my home. I want my home back. And those people will say, it’s our home now. So I think that has to stop.

The injustice has to stop. And to the extent that the courts can give any land back to Palestinians who have any kind of claim on it, that has to be done. But short answer of federal system,

[00:36:55] Cody Cook: j Jacob had mentioned growing up in a pro Zionist kind of household. Chris, were you initially one of those Christians who supported Israel that reservation for theological reasons?

And how do you see those kinds of theologies, dispensational and that kind of thing shaping America’s foreign policy?

[00:37:10] Chris Todd: Absolutely. I grew up that way. I grew up in churches where we were taught dispensational theology and completely pro-Israel and Israel. I stand with Israel in every circumstance, and that’s where I was.

Until I started learning something about the situation and the history of it and getting to know the people involved in it, and I started seeing that the things that I had been taught weren’t very Jesus. And now I understand that most of the people who are pushing dispensational theology and who are pushing the political agenda, the, I’ll use the word Christian Zionist agenda in the United States, they actually are looking forward to the destruction of Israel.

Isn’t it ironic that the people who are going so much out of their way to push American politics in favor of Israel are doing so because they hold a theology that looks forward to the destruction of the nation of Israel in a [00:38:00] horrible Armageddon. And so, so yes, that very much pushes the American political scene, and at its core it is anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish.

[00:38:10] Cody Cook: Yeah, the, the example you gave saying that we’re trying to push Israel into basically being destroyed to, can I think of like the, the friend who goes with you to the bar who always encourages you to get into a fight? Well, so I mean there, there are these theological narratives that are appealed to like the, like one you just mentioned, the dispensationalist thing, kind of end times prophecy stuff.

And we use those to justify supporting Israel even when they’re definitely in the wrong morally speaking. And I’ve seen in the past where both of you have appealed in interviews and other content to covenant theology to counter these narratives. So what does covenant theology and how does it stand in contrast to its alternatives?

And that, and whoever, I guess maybe as Jacob’s written on this more recently, Amy, and he’s talked a little less so far, so maybe we’ll let Jacob give the introduction to Covenant Theology and Chris can back him up with anything else he wants to add.

[00:38:55] Jacob Winograd (2): As you may know, the team at Hodsworth Media has worked with me for a long time producing this show and most of the shows at the Christians for Liberty network. A big part of that over the past couple years has been using the pods worth app to make the audio sound clean, level, and professional, even when the raw recordings were super sketchy.

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[00:40:57] Jacob Winograd: Sure. I would say the simplest way to explain covenant theology is that in, in contrast to Dispensationalist.

Theology, which tends to sort of divide the Bible into different dispensations where God’s kind of doing different things with different people at different times, and to be fair, that is taught logically true. But covenant theology says that these different things at different times are actually just part of one unified story of redemption, that from the fall, and then the promise of redemption given in Genesis three, that the offspring of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.

He will crush the serpent’s head, and the serpent will bruise his heel. That’s the gelian and all the way through Abraham, and then Moses and then David, and then culminating in Christ that these are just the building of different covenants that. Progressively over time. I know the word progressive maybe has a certain connotation to it here in the [00:42:00] west, but yeah, God’s revelation is progressively re revealed over time throughout these d through these different covenants and promises to these, to Abraham, Moses and David, and then find their ultimate fulfillment.

Not in geopolitical Israel, but in Jesus and his body church. So yeah, it’s just a, you could say it’s like a fancy way of just saying it’s the story of the Bible. It is the story of God’s plan to redeem a specific people for him. And this is often called replacement theology, but it’s, I think that’s a bit of a pejorative term.

I like to call it fulfillment theology, and I think it’s not to. It’s not anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish. It’s to say that the Jewish people actually play as Paul says in Romans nine at the beginning. Like they, they play such a important role in this redemptive story ‘ cause they’re the ones who were initially the, the holders and the carriers of this promise, of this covenant promise.

And the Jews haven’t been replaced, but the branch that’s spoken of in Romans Nime is cut off for the Gentiles to be grafted in. But the Jewish people themselves can all also be grafted back in, but not through works and not through merits of the flesh, but rather through how it’s always been shown throughout scripture.

It’s been one covenant people who are justified and sanctified, sanctified through grace by faith.

[00:43:21] Chris Todd: Amen to that. I love the way Jacob explained that I will just offer some supporting views without, and I don’t disagree with anything he said. It was all a very good description of covenant theology. Let’s go back to Genesis chapter three, verse chapter 12, verse three.

Genesis chapter 12 verse three, and people who are diehard about the fact that if you love Jesus, you must support the nation of Israel will say this to you. They will say, I will bless those who bless Israel, and I will curse those who curse Israel. And they’re changing the words of the Bible when they do it.

They are actually perverting the word of God, because that is not what it says. It totally [00:44:00] does not say that. It says in exact quote, I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you, I will curse and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. Now, God was not saying that to Israel, not to the nation of Israel, not to the people of Israel.

Israel himself had not been born yet. God was not even saying this to Abraham. God was saying this to Abram, a Gentile who had not yet been circumcised. So start talking about that being some. Call that we must stand with Israel in all circumstances. You’ve changed what the Bible says. Please don’t do that.

Please read the word of God. Obey the word of God. Follow the Word of God. And if you look at what covenant theology would teach us, covenant theology would tell us that there’s only ever been one promise of God, one promise of God from beginning to end. And that promise was Jesus and those of our forefathers in the faith from Abraham to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and Moses and all the others who followed, all of them were believing in the covenant and promise of God.

And that promise was always Jesus. And so the people today who believe in Jesus and who follow Jesus are the people of God. No political nation has a claim on that. No political entity has a claim on that. And one of the things that I say to American Christians when I want to get this home to them is I say to them.

You are supporting a people who are hostile to Jesus, who have said openly they are enemies of Christ. You’re supporting them as they attack your brothers and sisters in Christ, because not all Palestinians are Muslims folk. About 10% of Palestinians worldwide are Christians and there are still Christian villages and churches all through the lands of Palestine.

[00:45:57] Cody Cook: So I’ll maybe try to summarize kind of quickly [00:46:00] for those who are maybe not as familiar with these issues, and you guys can tell me if I got it right. Then also maybe address the, maybe a little bit of pushback that I might have, which is okay. So maybe just start, I’ll start by summarizing. So basically Dispensationalist tend to see two, kind of two covenants, that there’s one with Israel regarding the land and the Torah, and then one with the church.

And then both of those covenants are still active. So in some extreme dis dispensational are even gonna argue that there’s really just two methods of being saved, that Jews can be saved by the law. And Christians, gentiles are saved through Christ. Now in contrast, covenant theologians are gonna see one way of salvation and and ultimately one covenant.

And so because of that, there’s really just one covenant. All the promises to Israel are fulfilled through Christ and in the church. So I’ll admit that I have some doubts about covenant theology, at least in part. And so in particular, there’s the assertion by many of its proponents that all the prophecies about Israel and its future restoration are fulfilled spiritually through the church.

And part of me loves the idea that ethnicity doesn’t matter in the kingdom of God. And I think it’s largely true, but I also see lots of biblical passages, mostly Old Testament, but even some perhaps in the New Testament. About ethnic Israel’s future restoration. And in those passages, gentile inclusion is discussed as like a separate feature.

So you see it in Isaiah, you see it in Aria. Revelation arguably even has that too. When the new Jerusalem comes down, it talks about the nations coming in and out. So there’s this distinction between these people of God and then who are in the new Jerusalem and then the nations. And I mean, are the nations saved?

Are they, what? What’s going on there? It’s really kind of complicated. And so I think that that makes me suspicious, that part of this idea that the church is always, the fulfillment of Israel is, is kind of like an allegorical origin style revision of the text. And so anyway, all that said, here’s my question.

In order to push back on the state of Israel when it does wrong. Do we have to embrace covenant theology and toto, or can we make [00:48:00] a more broad appeal that maybe doesn’t require that we sort of resolve our eschatological differences to the fact that Jesus told his Jewish audience and the Sermon on the Mount to love their enemies?

I mean, can’t we argue that no matter what God may have in store for the Jewish people in the end times, which we honestly can’t, that’s a topic shrouded in mystery anyway, we can’t really be certain about what that’s gonna look like. So regardless of what God may have in store for Jewish people, in the end times, can’t we say that followers of Jesus can’t be justifying what our Lord has specifically abo, which is this idea that we’re going to justify something evil that somebody does because of their race or ethnicity?

[00:48:35] Jacob Winograd: I think at most you would be able to use that to perhaps explain why Christians shouldn’t engage in in those acts. But I think, and it’s a spectrum, I suppose I, I, I would not say that you need covenant theology to be able to criticize Israel. But I think Dispensationalist makes it harder to do that, if not impossible, and then everything in between.

It’s just varying degrees of muddiness because if you don’t have a coherent theology of the covenants to explain why, if promise is made specifically to the Jewish people, if you believe that they are not fulfilled in Christ and that they are in some effect still to be fulfilled today, I think you would have to give some sort of answer as to why the Jewish people would not be justified in just as they cleared out the land in the old covenant.

Why can they not clear out the land today? And I, I think that, and I want to just slightly amend something you said that the church is the fulfillment. Or the inheritor of all the promises of Israel. That’s kind of true, but I think it’s missing a step because I think what the New Testament really shows us when it’s reading back into the Old Testament, is that Christ is truly the true Israel.

I think that’s what’s said in Galatians three and four, and even before that though, just in the [00:50:00] first gospel in Matthew, you have Matthew two, which says this was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet out of Egypt. I called my son when they fled to Egypt to, to escape. Herod and I, I have a special history with this text because of my Jewish family.

I, I’ve had this text thrown at me by, by them as a, well, Hosea 11, which is what this text is referencing, is not a Messianic text, so Matthew’s just an idiot and made up some kind of prophecy that isn’t there. When I dug into this, it deepened my conviction, not only in my belief of the New Testament as wholly inspired, but in covenant theology because there’s, it’s such a subtle but yet deep and complex point that Matthew’s making.

Here he is pointing back to Jose 11, which is a passage where Jose, 11 to 13 is almost like God speaking through the prophet to recant his history with the Jewish people, and starting out by saying, out of Egypt, I called you and like I gave you this specific mission, right? That you were supposed to be my chosen people and a blessing to the nation and a teacher of righteousness.

But Israel failed in all that, that God had called them to and had broken the covenant. So when Matthew’s hearkening back to this, he is essentially, I don’t know how else you could read this, saying that Jesus is the typological fulfillment of. Israel and that actually what Jesus’ story is basically walking through the same journey as Israel did as a nation, but succeeding where Israel failed.

He goes down to Egypt, he passes through the water with his baptism, goes into the wilderness for 40 days, and he’s tested, but he does not fall. He does not sin, he does not disobey God. And then he does become the, the way to the father and the example for the nations. So yeah. And as far as all the promises and whatnot, if they’ve been fulfilled or not, there again, this is, there, there are, we’d have another episode to go through all the, I mean, there’s so many [00:52:00] prophecies and Isaiah and Zacharia and et cetera, but I, I will say that like the book of Hebrews.

Hebrews elevens were my favorite passages. And I just love the line that these all died in faith not having received the things promised, but as it is they desire a better country. And that is a heavenly one. And I think that what Christ does is take our focus off these earthly temporal things. And as Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world.

The true Jerusalem that we look forward to is not a going back to the past in a reestablishment of some earthly temple and earthly nation. But we looked at we, our promises are better. And all those promises were typological and pointing forward to those better promises.

[00:52:42] Cody Cook: Yeah, and I mean, I mean with Hosea, but before I let maybe Chris jump in as well, so I mean, Hosea is not giving a prophecy though Hosea.

Hosea is talking about something that happened in Israel’s past. And then Matthew is saying that there is a typological relationship here between Israel, God’s son, who’s imperfect. Jesus God’s son who is perfect. And so I don’t, I mean, I just pulled off my shelf, Michael Brown’s answering Jewish objections to Jesus where he talks about this and he says some similar things that, that you’ve said, but he’s a dispensationalist.

And so I, I don’t know that reading necessarily requires a covenant theology understanding. I think that there’s a lot of tension there because I think there is that a lot that’s fulfilled in Jesus. And you see the way that Paul, in particular will sometimes use these texts to point forward to kind of a larger fulfillment or talking about how the people who are no people were with all that kind of stuff.

Like you said, it would take us a, a pretty farfield to get too deep into it, but it does seem to me that there, there can be, I think, some dangers of having overly simplistic readings of scripture. That sort of, kind of smooth out all the rough edges, whether you’re going with kind of a strong dispensational viewpoint that really says, we’re gonna take the Old Testament literally, and we’re gonna ignore all the kind of New Testament nuancing, or a covenant viewpoint that sort of says, we’re just gonna have everything fulfilled in [00:54:00] Christ and then we don’t have to really deal with any of the kind literal promises that are made.

That suspicion is that maybe it’s a little bit in the middle, and as for if we don’t have covenant theology, does that mean Israel can do whatever they want? Well, I’d say, well, no, because at the very least as Christians, we shouldn’t be supporting that. And Jesus came to his people as Emeran said, this isn’t what it means to follow Torah.

This isn’t acceptable. And so there, there’s still, they’d still be in the wrong for doing that. I think it would just, and then I think more importantly, and this is an observation that the Orthodox Jews made at the beginning of Zionism. Is that we we’re not supposed to go back to Israel until the Messiah leads us back.

And so if we have a secular progressive movement that’s disobedient to Torah and trying to kind of bring us back politically, that’s not the kind of fulfillment that we’re looking for. That’s an illegitimate fulfillment. So I think E, even if, obviously I think there’s a problem if you go kind of full dispensationalist, but I think that there, I don’t know that you necessarily have to take on the kind of full covenant theology viewpoint, either that there’s, maybe we can have a little bit of nuance in the text.

You don’t necessarily have to take one particular perspective on the end times or something just to be able to criticize Israel when they do something that’s wrong.

[00:55:12] Jacob Winograd: I wanna let Chris talk, but I just wanna make a really quick clarifier here to say that within covenant theology you’ll see people who are amillennialists and post millennialist, and even some who are pre, you can have a view that says perhaps Israel will be some sort of player in.

The end times, right? And that maybe some of those prophecies do have some sort of literal fulfillment in terms of Israel playing some role. But this is to be, I think you have to separate that from the question of can we criticize what Israel is doing? So I just wanna separate those two because I don’t want to have the focus of this B eschatology, because that’s, that is kind of entirely different connected.

But like you could believe Israel’s gonna play a role in the, I know [00:56:00] faithful pre millennialist who are very staunch critics of Israel. Right? But at the end of the day, it’s like you need some kind of theology of the covenant that tells you whatever promises the Jewish people were given that either. So covenant theology says that these have all been fulfilled in Christ if they haven’t all been fulfilled.

You need some sort of scriptural theology or answer there for why something like the Land Promise. Is still on effect, but that the Jewish people would not be justified in reclaiming that in the same way that they claimed it in the old covenant scriptures. And you’re right that some Jews think that is for the Messiah to do, but that’s, that is not the conclusive book closed view of Judaism throughout the years.

Right. There are there. There’s also, within Orthodox Christianity, there is a strong view that there is no one Messiah or och as they say, that there are just many different types of ochs that rise throughout history and do different things, but they don’t necessarily, and that maybe there might be one final och who just creates the greater Israel that becomes the kingdom that then reigns over the entire Earth and that teaches the Gentiles the way of the Lord.

But, but that, but that wouldn’t be to say that like what’s going on in Israel now is unjust. You could, as I said, say that Christians perhaps are not. To support what Israel’s doing because we’re not called to engage in those acts. But then at the very least, all you can say is, well, you can criticize Christians for being involved, but I don’t think you could sit there with any strong scriptural backing and say, Israel is not justified in what they’re doing to the Palestinians and not justified in saying that, well, it’s okay because God promised us this land.

That is ultimately it. It comes down to that, and it comes down to can God break his promises? And the dispensational and non [00:58:00] covenantal view would be that, well, God hasn’t broken his promises to the Jewish people. He’s still gonna save them. Okay, but how the, the middle ground you speak of, the nuance just seems to me to be muddy because I, to me, the path is narrow.

We are saved through, through grace by faith. That is what it says in Romans. It’s what it says in Galatians, that’s what it says in. Pretty implicitly in Hebrews, that’s what it says in the Gospels and anything we leave open that says that suddenly the Jewish people, well, there’ll be some large inclusion and God hasn’t abandoned them and he will save them.

But it is it, you start, and I, sure I’m wary of simplistic answers, but I’m also wary of muddying the field to the point where we think are muddying the gospel, right? Like the point where we’re nuancing the gospel and salvation. And faith alone. I think we’re, and just also, I don’t know, I think what the covenantal story offers here is to understand the purpose of Old Testament Israel, which was like, I’d be curious what the counter answer would be here.

What is the, why did God do what he did in Old Testament Israel? I think the covenant theology answer gives you a really good understanding that like God did this to. Really demonstrate our need for a savior and the failure of trying to create a righteous people through law and and coercion and to show us our need for not just that personal savior, but that creation itself, Christ out to be saved and that we need a king who can rule us but not an earthly king.

[00:59:38] Cody Cook: Yeah, and this comes back to sort of the, these tensions here because at the end there you sort of seem to be saying that there is, there are tensions between the old and the new covenant, which it’s not so simple. There are things that are dispensationalist are gonna want to argue for continuity in places where covenant theologians are gonna for disc discontinuity.

And I don’t wanna lose the gospel either, but I think when it comes to end time stuff, I just have to [01:00:00] acknowledge that. Everybody was wrong about what Jesus’ first coming was going to look like. And so I don’t want to be overly confident. Well,

[01:00:07] Jacob Winograd: yeah, like, like I said, that’s the end times. I think it’s just a different discussion.

’cause again, you can be 100% covenantal and still interpret, you know, that Israel plays some kind of role in the end. You know what’s funny is that though, when you talk, when I talk to pre millennialist who have the view that Israel plays a role in the end, times they go, they play a role, it doesn’t mean they play a good role.

Right? They can, they almost play a role of, it’s actually one of the backdoor strongest answers for the pre-millennial view is that they say, well, Israel’s gonna play a role, but they’re gonna be playing this more antagonistic role, that bringing more evil into the world than good. Which is kind of what we see happening.

But,

[01:00:43] Cody Cook: well, I, I will say a, as an Armenian, the all Israel will be saved as a tougher passage for me than it is for you as a Calvinist Jacob, because God can just save everybody if he wants. All he’s gotta do is flip the switch. No. Okay, so real quick. So a quick thing here about antisemitism, as we’re getting to the end of this conversation, there seems to be a rise in anti-Jewish rhetoric and I think a boldness of which it’s being spouted, at least on Twitter, which is not real life, of course.

And I su, I suspect that part of the cause here is blowback from Zionists, arguing that criticism of Israel’s is inherently anti-Semitic. And it seems that there’s a lot of folks out there who aren’t necessarily super smart, who are taking Zionists at their word and blaming Jews in general for what Israel is doing.

And so could a disentangling of Jews, the Jewish people in Israel, help alleviate some of this rhetoric? And is there some potential danger in the other direction of an extreme covenant theology that presents Israel as being divorced by God because of their stubbornness? It seems like there’s extremes on both sides here that could kind of a super pro Zionist and super anti Zionist.

That could create a really kind of a negative antisemitic viewpoint on Israel. I’d be curious based since Jacob and I’ve been talking for the last couple minutes, I’d be curious to get Chris’s thoughts first, and then maybe we’ll let Jacob give his thoughts and we’ll wrap it up.

[01:01:57] Chris Todd: Yeah, that’s a great question.

[01:02:00] Here’s what I would say. If you currently support what the nation of Israel is doing, you are not a friend of Israel. You are not a friend of Israel. If you support and encourage what they are doing right now, you are watching your drunken friend drive a car down the street and kill people, and you are not stopping them.

You are not that person’s friend. If you are a friend of Israel, you will encourage them to follow the path of peace. And so when we talk about antisemitism, it is anti-Semitic to work toward the disruption of Israel, which is what many of their soul called friends are doing right now. And and I would just say, can we instead.

Follow the teachings of Jesus and encourage other people to do that. Can we be advocates of peace? Can we lay out a plan that is beautiful for the nation of Israel and for all the people around it? Can we follow that path instead? And since we’re editing this, Cody, will you ask me the question again, because I feel like I went off on a tangent.

[01:03:02] Cody Cook: No problem. Well, yeah, I was just, I was kind of just asking about the ways in which linking Jewish people with Israel, so that if you criticize Israel, you’re antisemitic. It, it, I, it’s, I’m suspicious that a lot of this kind of growth and antisemitism is coming from the fact that people who want to kind of cynically create political support for Israel by bringing in antisemitism as the only reason you could criticize Israel.

That people are being sort of taken at their word by a lot of folks who say, okay, well then if I don’t like Israel, then I guess I hate Jews too.

[01:03:33] Chris Todd: Yeah. I think that linking, being anti-Israel would, being anti-Semite. It’s very harmful to Jewish people because what it does is it says you must believe that this is what Judaism about is about.

You must believe that Judaism is about what you see them doing in Gaza. You must believe that Judaism is about what you see them doing in the West Bank and even in Lebanon. That’s [01:04:00] what Judaism is. If you’re not willing to unlink the actions of the state of Israel from your understanding of what it is to be a Jewish person.

And so I would say that for the safety and the wellbeing of the Jewish people, you cannot link those two things together.

[01:04:17] Jacob Winograd: Yeah. I just wanna piggyback really quick on that because the way I often say it is that the state of Israel and Zionism as a phenomena doesn’t actually make me feel safer as a person who is ethnically Jewish because I have actually just, I have seen a rise in antisemitism on the online discourse and even in the world, broadly speaking.

And I don’t think we’re necessarily at pre-World War II levels or anything like that, but it doesn’t for, especially the people, as Chris has said, the people living there, you know what’s going on. It is not doing any favors to them for their long-term safety and security or even their salvation at that point.

And, and yeah, I think that just as I can criticize the American government and not be bigoted toward Americans, and I can criticize the Chinese government and not hate the Chinese people, I can. Criticize the state of Israel and I can criticize the listen like there. There is just this unfortunate sort of mental bug in our mind.

I think where we are generally in the West, not for ethnic nationalism, and we’ve seen how that tend towards very bad outcomes, right? In Western Europe, especially in the 19 hundreds. Now I understand from studying the history of all the persecution the Jewish people went through in the 18, 17, really, I mean for centuries, but in the momentum of the 18 hundreds into the 19 hundreds, especially when you study that and the pogroms going on in Eastern and western [01:06:00] Europe, you kind of understand that at some point the Jewish people and many great people from the times said.

No more. We’re done with this and we need to have our own place that we can be safe and free. And I don’t even begrudge them wanting to leave Eastern and Western Europe and migrate back to a land that has historical significance for them. The only thing I object to is a, tying that to theological promises, which I think are, if you’re doing it from a Jewish perspective, you’re missing Christ.

And if you’re doing it from a Christian perspective, you’re, as I said, I think you’re undermining the gospel. ’cause I don’t think the point, land insecurity is important, but ultimately Jesus doesn’t lead us to land. He leads us to himself. And then beyond that, I lost my train of thought there. Yeah. But beyond that, if you’re, even if you’re going to go and say this, leaving this area, going to this area would be better for us.

That’s fine, but just because you were persecuted doesn’t give you the right to now become the persecutor. And it is, its unfortunate reality, right? You hurt people. And that’s true on an individual level. And I think that’s true on a historical sociological level too. As far as these movements go. The answer, as Chris has said many times, more e elo, eloquent, more eloquently than me, is that the answer is Christ.

And I think this is something we would agree on, that the, the gospel breaks down these dividing walls and we stop looking at ourselves firmly or predominantly in these earthly and political lenses. And that’s, that is ultimately and on this side of eternity, I think we all understand that there will always be wars and rumors of war and turmoil and conflict, but we can certainly pray for this specific situation to not persist anymore if.

Many people on both sides, Palestinian, Arab, Jew, the whole world, those coming to Christ and not just coming to Christ nominally, but coming to a [01:08:00] true transformation of their heart where we no longer look at each other through these lenses, and we no longer act being led by, by revenge or by fear, but through the hope we have in Christ and the promise of eternity we have in him.

But yeah, just to tie a bow on that, yeah. I think antisemitism is a real problem, and Zionism is sort of the flip coin of that. And to some extent, it’s this perverse incentive where Zionism kind of needs antisemitism because that’s how they justify it. They look around and go, look how many people hate the Jews.

That’s why we have to have our own special homeland. I think we as Christians have to find a place where we can say, you know what? Antisemitism is horrible. It’s led to horrific tragedies in history and we should be against that. But the Jewish people, despite their prevalence, their important role in redemptive history, at the end of the day, they don’t get a special pass to collective eyes and commit collective violence and colle and cast collective judgment on other groups just because of those historical circumstances.

[01:09:08] Cody Cook: Yeah. So we could go back and do it again. We should have just given them some land in Montana and just been over with it. Alright, so the, I want to kind of end by just kind of directing people Southern

[01:09:16] Chris Todd: from Germany was the place for that.

[01:09:17] Cody Cook: Yeah, that would’ve been good. Okay, so where can people, so people hopefully know where to find stuff about Jacob Biblical Anarchy podcast.

You do stuff through Libertarian Christian Institute and your Twitter handle is, I believe biblical anarchy, right, Jacob?

[01:09:30] Jacob Winograd: Yeah, on Twitter and pretty much anywhere. If you look at biblical anarchy, you will find me. Share.

[01:09:34] Cody Cook: And then Chris, where can people find more about you and your work, especially the work you’re doing with kind of healing people who are dealing with some of this traumatic, these traumatic experiences from the past?

[01:09:44] Chris Todd: Yeah, I would say go to our website, which is words of isa.org and ISA spelled ISA, words of.org.

[01:09:53] Cody Cook: Great. Ed, are you on social media? Anything like that, people might be able to follow you there.

[01:09:57] Chris Todd: Because of the sensitivity of our work, we [01:10:00] don’t have as much social media. I, I kind of control that a lot, so I hear you.

[01:10:04] Cody Cook: Okay, fair enough. Alright, well thank you guys both very much for this conversation. I hope that it’s helpful for listeners and I, Chris, I appreciate, especially appreciate you bringing your own experience into this ’cause I think it’s one of, it’s very easy to have an opinion about a situation that you’re very far away from.

So you close to It gives, I think, special insight that we might not be able to have normally.

[01:10:25] Chris Todd: Well, thank you for the chance Cody to be on your podcast. Jacob, it has been great to get to know you, brother. I love your spirit and I’m very impressed with how informed you are about a number of things.

[01:10:35] Jacob Winograd: Thanks.

As a, again, as a person who is Jewish and was raised in these things, I can’t help but just every time I read Romans nine and I read that first paragraph about how he would condemn himself only to save his own people of the flesh. I mean, I have his heart too. Like at the end of the day, I, all people, and even maybe especially the Jewish people, I, I love them and because I love them.

I just, I want them to get the fullness of the revelation of God, which is in Christ and to, to no longer be pursuing these earthly, fleshly things.

Oh, amen. Amen to that.

Alright guys, I hope you enjoyed that. Please make sure you like, share, subscribe, five star reviews, all of that. I hope you find the same joy that I can find in this, that we get to partake in God’s story with him. That as much as it’s, it’s about God, that because it’s, it makes, it makes our inclusion in it that much more spectacular and amazing.

And so I hope you hope this was good, but it was edifying as I always conclude by saying, live at peace, live for Christ. Take care.

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