It is neither convenient nor cheap, but it means and is worth everything.
In any survey of the relationship between the Church and the Synagogue—their respective communities—through history, the report would declare a tumultuous history. Any case of graduated tensions mentions ambivalence, and those exceptions are rarely surpassed with friendliness. Though the suffering Savior “abolished in His flesh the enmity between” Jew and Gentile,[1] one is hard-pressed to find historical tranquility between Jew and Christian...
“In the almost fifty years that I have worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”
"We are in the middle of a study of eschatology, focusing on Israel. We are at the beginning of the bigger study of eschatology, but kind of in the middle of studying the role that Israel plays in eschatology. If you wonder what eschatology is, that is a long word, it basically means the study of last things, from the Greek word eschaton which means last things. What does the Bible say about the end of the world? What does the Bible say about the end of history? What has God planned for the end? ..."
If the arguments and mud swirling and slinging around Jerusalem were simply about soil—dirt—or a geopolitical tension in the Middle East along with every other war and fractured boundary line in the bleeding Arab world, we’d leave it well alone. If the consequences of these ideologies hadn’t historically resulted in genocide and political partnership with a pagan nation, we’d leave it well alone. If the Judeo-Christian Scriptures were silent on the future of this people, land, nation and city, we’d leave it well alone... Trouble is...
In 1839, the Church of Scotland dispatched a delegation of four ministers to investigate the condition of Jewish communities throughout Europe and the land of Palestine. While M'Cheyne was away, W.C. Burns pastored M'Cheyne's parish in his stead, and the LORD visited their fellowship with power. M'Cheyne and his colleagues were convinced blessing had come as they blessed Abraham's sons, and convicted they should spearhead new efforts to honor the Jews with their Gospel.
He preached the following upon return,
17 November 1839.
My comment: This is paradoxically the inverse consequence of that which is intended for blessing. It underlies and compounds all grievances in those who should have been the recipients of God-intended blessings—grievances, conscious or unconscious, that can be kindled unto rage! That rage, I am suggesting, is called anti-Semitism. It has haunted us as a people throughout our history [even prior to the advent of Christendom] to the present day. Can it, considering the text, be viewed as judgment? Judgment, not only in the punitive sense but in the redemptive, in that it should act as a spur to restore us in our call to the nations to “bless all the families of the earth”; to be that priestly nation that teaches the people the difference between the sacred and the profane; not only by our words, but, necessarily, by our example?
"As the restoration of the Jews is not only a most desirable event, but one which God has determined to accomplish, Christians should keep it constantly in view even in their labors for the conversion of the Gentiles."
There can be no true and full preaching of the Gospel without explaining the mystery of Israel. The very "simplest form of speech which infant lips can try"—the most elementary expression of our faith—is, "Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah"; and who can understand what is meant by the word Messiah who does not know the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, that this is the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham? The sum and substance of all the declaration of the Church is this—that Jesus has come in humility and died upon Golgotha, and that Jesus is coming again in glory. And who can understand the first and the second advents of our blessed Lord, without understanding that people which, so to say, forms the link between the two, even Israel, whom God has chosen that through them should be made known His glory and His salvation?