By Charles Gardner —
The shameful pro-Palestinian protests in London and elsewhere has some of us wondering if we are on another planet. And, in a sense, we are.
How can an unprovoked attack on Israel leaving 1,200 dead – including women and children mercilessly butchered by brutal savages – be turned around to focus on the aggressors as victims?
Not in any civilized society, for sure, though of course we acknowledge that there are innocent Palestinians caught in the crossfire as Israel rightfully seeks to defend itself.
The truth is that protests backing Hamas savagery are the result of turning our backs (as a nation) on God’s Law, as some of us were reminded in a Zoom address yesterday by Rev Dr Joe Boot.
The Ten Commandments were handed to Moses as a template for the whole world to govern diligently and with integrity. But they have been recklessly stripped away since the God who graciously gave them saved us from Nazi dictatorship.
Not surprisingly, we are now rapidly descending into barbarism. For if we refuse to follow God’s Law, we make up our own and it becomes ‘dog eat dog’, caring only for ourselves and our personal appetites.
We thought we knew better than God, so we legalized abortion, mercilessly killing ten million babies in the womb (in the UK) since the Act was passed in 1967. We have also legalized homosexuality, blasphemy, Sunday trading and easy divorce, with euthanasia possibly next.
But as the Apostle John said, “sin is lawlessness” (1 John 3:4), and the Lord Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount made it clear: “Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will be any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” (Matthew 5:17f)
Even the punctuation marks are important, he is saying. Jesus came to help us obey the law, not do away with it, and thank God – and the wonderful ninth century Anglo-Saxon King Alfred, who began to codify our law based on the Ten Commandments – our laws and the great civilization built around them have been exported to many parts of the world via the gospel.
Even the stone floor of our Parliament is inscribed (in Latin) with the words of Psalm 127: “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain.”
But then came our post-war rebellion, quickly forgetting all our merciful Savior has done for us, as Israel has repeatedly done in times past.
So when our parliament passes laws that plainly contradict our God-given inheritance, it should not surprise us that lawlessness breaks out.
Western governments, it seems, now want liberty without gospel, and morality without Christ. But if we wish to arrest the decline of our culture, we need to repent of our great sin and call on our leaders to do the same before it’s too late.
In many ways we are already under judgment. The lame police presence at protests involving blatant support for terrorists officially banned by the government is truly shocking, provoking one of our top writers to ask: “How can the British Left make excuses for a terrorist group that murders women and children?”
The aforementioned Dr Boot heads up the Ezra Institute, promoting a return to Torah (i.e. God’s Law or Instruction). It’s about living in God’s order, he told a Zoom meeting of the Church’s Ministry among Jewish people (CMJ), and Jesus is the living Torah.
In fact, he pointed out, the first Pentecost was on Mt Sinai when Moses was given the precious Law. And it was on the Day of Pentecost some 1,500 years later that the Holy Spirit enabled Jesus’ first disciples to follow the Law, now written on their hearts.
King Charles III at his recent coronation promised to maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the gospel and was reminded that the whole world was subject to the power and empire of Christ our Redeemer.
“Torah not only shaped the history of the Western world, but remains relevant today,” Dr Boot said, adding that it was Ezra who called Israel back from idolatry to the word of God.
“The Ten Commandments used to hang on the walls of our courts,” he said. “In many respects the Bible is a legal document. But as we’ve departed from it, we’re coming increasingly under God’s judgment.”
Remember that it was the Jewish people who gave the Bible to the world, along with the prophets, the patriarchs and the Messiah himself. How grateful we should be!
But the devil is orchestrating a vicious rebellion by targeting the Jews. And it will be the Christians next, although in many parts of the world they are already under severe persecution.
Madeline Grant, writing in The Telegraph, sums up the situation well with her statement that “if Britain isn’t a place where Jews can live safely, it really is game over for our civilization.”
Another Telegraph writer, Allison Pearson, says the horror in Israel has put the failure of Western multi-culturalism on shocking display, adding that “our country has grown so weak and pathetic that the Barbarians among us must be appeased in the name of diversity and cultural sensitivity”.
Juliet Samuel, in The Times, asks a similar question: “Why is the UK tiptoeing around hate merchants?”
Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, in a Times article in 2010, urged support for Israel on the basis that “if it goes down, we all go down”. He argued that the Jewish state is at the cutting edge of the battle between militant Islam and the West and concluded: “Israel is a fundamental part of the West which is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel lost, then we are lost too. Whether we like it or not our fate in inextricably intertwined.”
