Connecting the Bible to Today Part 2: Christianity

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Welcome to Out of Zion with Susan Michael, an exploration of the Bible and the land of

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Israel.

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From ancient biblical sites to the story behind the stories, join Susan on a journey through

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the most exciting book on the planet.

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Hit the subscribe button for future episodes which will deepen your faith and bring the

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Bible to life.

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And now here's our host, Susan Michael.

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Well, hey there and welcome back.

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This is the Out of Zion podcast and our Israel Answers Teaching series.

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We're taking a few weeks now to connect the Bible to modern Israel and we're covering a

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few subjects to sort of bridge that gap for you before we go on to talk about and answer

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some of your questions about Israel in this series.

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So today we're talking about the development of the religion of Christianity since the

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time of the Bible.

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In our biblical teachings we had a previous series walk through the Bible.

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We really laid the foundation for the Jewish roots of Christianity.

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Everything that we hold dear as Christians was given to us through and by the Jewish

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people.

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We're like wild olive branches that have been grafted in to this tree of faith that

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goes all the way back to Abraham.

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And we receive such sustenance and growth from understanding God's covenants with the

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Jewish people, His promises to them, the temple worship, the apostle Paul listed all these

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things in Romans 9 verses 4 and 5 where he lists the things that God gave to Israel and

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through them we're receiving them.

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So let's read it where he says,

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There's is the adoption of sons.

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There's the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship

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and the promises.

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Others are the patriarchs and from them is traced the human ancestry of Christ who is

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God over all for ever praised.

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Amen.

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So our roots are in the Jewish faith and our Messiah Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.

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He was born a Jewish baby to a Jewish parents in a Jewish town and ministered to the Jewish

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people, he said he was called to the house of Israel.

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So how did we then separate from these Jewish roots?

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How is that Christianity is so different today from Judaism?

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So last week we talked about the development of Judaism.

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Today I want to talk about the development of Christianity.

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So as I said last week, one of the really moments of great impact was in 70 AD when

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the Roman forces destroyed the city of Jerusalem, the temple and ended all of the sacrificial

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system that had taken place there in the temple.

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And during this time the headquarters of the Jewish faith moved up north, but during the

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siege of Jerusalem and the fighting of Jerusalem, the early believers in Jesus had fled the city.

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Why?

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Because Jesus had warned them, he said there will be an embankment around Jerusalem when

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you see these days approaching flee.

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And so they had fled and they missed out on the siege of Jerusalem.

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So when it was over, the temples destroyed, they began to trickle back into the city.

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They were kind of rejected.

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They were seen as traitors.

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They had not gone through the siege with everybody else.

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Fast forward then, 60 years later, it gets even worse.

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And this is when the Roman emperor Hadrian announced and decided that he was going to

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rebuild the city of Jerusalem, but he was going to rebuild it as a pagan city.

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And so where there had been the temple to the God of Israel, he was going to build a

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temple to Jupiter.

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And so there was a great reaction from the Jews and the zealots who I described to you

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last week.

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The zealots rose up against the Romans, but once again, after about a three-year siege

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in period, the Romans won and they put down this rebellion.

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And so they renamed Jerusalem, Elio Capitolina.

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They built pagan worship sites on top of any known Jewish worship site or Christian.

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And they also renamed the land of Israel that had been known as Judea in the Roman Empire,

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and they renamed it, Palestine.

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And so this is where the area began to be called Palestine, as here, from the Romans.

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So during this siege, though, that Hadrian led, it's known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt,

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because the revolt was led by a man named Simon Bar Kokhba.

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And he was proclaimed to be the Messiah, and the leading rabbis of the time proclaimed

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him as Messiah, whether they really believed it or not.

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I don't know, but it was to get everybody to rally behind him and to be a part of this

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revolt against the Roman forces.

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And the Christians could not support this because they believed Jesus was the Messiah,

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and they would not follow another Jewish Messiah.

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And so during the fighting of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, it got very bloody, and there were

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actually early Christians, Jewish believers in Jesus, who wouldn't follow the revolt that

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died in the revolt because of it.

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So this is really known in history as the split between the church and the synagogue.

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This is when it was really all over.

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It got bloody, and it was the split.

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After this time, Judaism moves north.

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The head of the Christian church begins to develop in other areas like Antioch and in

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Alexandria down in Egypt and in Rome.

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And it also moves out of Jerusalem as the headquarters.

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And we begin developing on two different tracks.

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So what started out as a first century internal squabble between Jews and Christians over

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the Messiahship of Jesus now ends up two different religions, both struggling to survive

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under the oppressive Roman Empire.

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And the Roman Empire had deemed Judaism as a legal religion, so the Jews were allowed

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to carry on their religion.

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So as soon as, as long as Christianity was seen as a part of the Jewish sect, it was

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protected, but once it became separate, it was no longer protected.

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And it became known as an illegal religion and became highly persecuted by the Romans.

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Now the Jews also were persecuted after the revolt there.

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You know, history goes on and different emperors are harder on the Jews, harder on the Christians,

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and other emperors are easier on them.

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But one of the worst times for the Christians under Rome was in 64 AD when Rome was on fire.

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And the emperor Nero needed somebody to blame, and he blamed the Christians.

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They were very persecuted, many of them were killed, they were executed, they were burned

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alive, and it's believed that the apostle Paul may have died during that time because

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he is not heard of after this bloody period under Nero.

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We know Paul was in Rome, but then his story, he goes silent, and so there's a lot of

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beliefs that it was during this period he may have died.

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So now throughout the Roman Empire, the church is growing, and at times it's freer to grow,

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and at times it's highly persecuted, but it is growing, and it's becoming predominantly

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gentile.

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There's just not as many Jews in the church anymore.

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And so these pagans that are converting to Christianity coming into the church, a lot

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of them had no understanding of the Jewish faith, of the Jewish roots of Christianity,

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of the Jewishness of Jesus, and where this faith had been born.

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And some of them may have even brought anti-Semitism with them from the Greek society.

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That's a whole other story.

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I don't have time to get into, but they may have brought it in with them.

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And so what happens is that several of the gentile church fathers began to preach against

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Judaism, and there's a lot of different reasons for it.

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But this is when the teaching, a replacement theology, or what's known as supercessionism,

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began to develop.

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And it taught that the Jews had been cursed by God because of their rejection of Jesus'

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messianic credentials, and therefore had been replaced by the church in the plans and purposes

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of God.

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And this theology led to a teaching of contempt of the Jewish people, that they were God-killers.

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And some of our church fathers preached terrible things about the synagogues and called them

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brothels, and you should have nothing to do with this.

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It's evil, it's unclean.

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And it's in the fourth century AD when the Roman emperor became a Christian, Constantine

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became a Christian.

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And a few decades later, Christianity is now the official state religion of the Roman empire.

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And at this point, these church fathers began to preach very hard against Judaism because

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they wanted to clarify, they wanted to separate the Christians from the Jewish roots and from

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the synagogue and from the associating with the Jewish people.

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And it's at this point that the church really paved the way for later generations that then

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passed laws against the Jewish people.

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It was the beginning was teaching against the Jewish faith, and then it moved into actual

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persecution of the Jewish people by these state churches and state rulers that are also the

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head of the church.

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It's a political mishmash.

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The church became impure because it was contaminated by politics and you'd have sometimes a very

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ungodly king or queen who was over the church.

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So this theology then became laws against the Jewish people.

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They couldn't own businesses, they couldn't own land, they couldn't live in certain areas.

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And then later they were put into ghettos and then sometimes they were just kicked out

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of the country altogether.

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They just didn't even want them living in their country.

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And this is the progression of anti-Semitism and the centuries of this type of teaching

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and hatred and discrimination paved the way for the Holocaust.

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Now the Holocaust was not carried out by Christians.

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The Nazis had their own strange beliefs, but many of the Nazi soldiers were still in churches,

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they were not excommunicated from the churches, so there is a little bit of a mishmash there.

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But Christianity did not carry out the Holocaust.

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The Holocaust was based on a racial cleansing of the human race in order to make the Aryan

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race the supreme race and the pure race.

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And so it really didn't have anything to do with religion, but centuries of Christian

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anti-Semitism had paved the way for it.

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We're going to talk more about that next week.

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I want to move on with our story because today there's been a major shift in Christianity.

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And I want you to understand why and what a blessing it is to be a part of a whole new

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day.

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It goes back almost 500 years ago when the Bible was translated into the everyday languages.

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And for the first time, the everyday Christian could actually read the Bible.

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You have to understand for centuries, they couldn't read the Bible.

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Many were illiterate, but many couldn't read it in the original languages.

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All they knew was what the church popes taught them or what was enacted in the masses in

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the church, and they really didn't know what the Bible taught.

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And then when the printing press came along and we were able to mass distribute these

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translations of the Bible, Christians were able to get their hands on Bibles and read

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it for themselves.

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And it started various movements, the separatist movement, to separate from the unclean state

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church and get back to a biblical first century church.

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That was followed by the Puritans that taught, we need to purify this state church.

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We need to bring it back to its biblical roots.

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There were the pietists that emphasized prayer and evangelism.

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And there were all these different movements, but it started with the translation of the

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Bible into the everyday language.

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And this birthed a Bible-based Christianity.

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It's a segment of Christianity.

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We call it the evangelical movement.

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But it goes back to these days.

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And these early pioneers of evangelical Christianity, they saw in the Bible that God had made all

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of these promises to the Jewish people, that he had eternal covenants with them and eternal

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promises.

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And the land, the gift of the land, was very much a part of these eternal promises.

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And that God had promised one day he was going to bring them back to their land.

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And so these early preachers were preaching this from the pulpit.

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And they all believed that one day the Jews would be restored to their land.

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And over time, as evangelical Christianity got stronger, and especially in England, it

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became known as the Restorationist movement, that the evangelical Christians supported

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the restoration of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland.

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So they were called Restorationists.

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And there were key leaders in the British government that helped actually in bringing

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about the birth of the state of Israel.

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But the point I want to make is that within Christianity itself, today evangelical Christianity

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is the fastest growing segment of the Christian world.

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And when I say the Christian world, I'm using it in a very broad term.

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It includes the Eastern Orthodox, the Catholic, the mainline Protestants, and the evangelical,

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the Pentecostals, the non-Pentecostal evangelicals.

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I mean, all of that, it involves all of it.

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Anybody that names the name of Christ is within the world of Christendom.

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And there's about, I think it's 2.5 billion Christians in the world.

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The fastest growing segment is the Bible-based Christianity, what we call evangelical Christianity.

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And the good news is that evangelical Christianity is largely fellow-Semitic.

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It is supportive of the Jewish people, of their return to the homeland.

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Now, today in the United States, evangelical Christianity is kind of plateaued.

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And some could argue that it's on the decline.

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And as a result, evangelical support for Israel is really not as strong as it was 20 years

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ago.

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But evangelical Christianity is in total revival and spreading like wildfire in Africa, Asia,

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and Latin America.

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And there, support of Israel is at an all-time high.

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It's affecting governments and everything because of the growth of evangelical Christianity

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within those countries.

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So today, it is a whole new day for Jewish-Christian relations because of this Bible-based Christianity

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that is becoming so influential within the Christian world.

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I think, I don't know the day that it's predicted that evangelical Christianity will

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be the largest segment, but for sure it will be because it's growing so quickly.

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And so today, we are able to come to an understanding of the Jewish roots of Christianity, of the

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Jewishness of Jesus.

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We understand God's promises to the Jewish people.

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We understand the calling on the Jewish people is still there.

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It has never been revoked.

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The apostle Paul said it's irrevocable, and we understand the importance of the Christian

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world, our calling to take the gospel to the four corners of the world.

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We understand all of this because we have the Bible today.

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And therefore, we are able as Christians to reach out in friendship to the Jewish people.

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The Jewish people are coming to learn that Christians are no longer their enemy as they

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were throughout history.

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And they're having to learn to trust us, and they're having to learn how to work with

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us.

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We kind of speak two different languages.

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We do definitely disagree on some things theologically, on salvation, on Jesus.

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We have very big disagreements between Judaism and Christianity.

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But for the first time in many, many, many years, we can agree to disagree and be friends,

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and have a relationship built on mutual respect.

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It is a whole new day, and you and I are part of it.

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So that finishes today's overview of the development of Christianity.

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And next week we're going to talk about anti-Semitism through the ages.

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So see you back here next week as we continue connecting the Bible to Israel today.

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And until then, God bless.

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We hope you have enjoyed this episode of Out of Zion with Susan Michael.

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Be sure to subscribe to Out of Zion now on Apple Podcasts, CPNshows.com, YouTube, or

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wherever you like to listen and learn.

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Out of Zion with Susan Michael is a production of ICEJUSA, All Rights Reserved.