Christian-Zionism": The Origins of a Dangerous Heresy

 

Christian-Zionism": The Origins of a Dangerous Heresy GUEST POST A Calvinist Minister Speaks Out Follow Nick Griffin on Substack Follow Nick on X Above: The author of this important guest piece, preaching in one of his local Congregationalist chapels. Co. Down, Northern Ireland Gird yourself! This is a piece of heavyweight writing, part-politics, part-history and part-theology. The author explains the remarkable origins of the most dangerous heresy on Earth: Dispensationalism, also known as Christian-Zionism. I am neither a Jew baiter nor an exponent of ‘White Power’, and I despise so-called ‘neo-Nazism’. However, I do get terribly frustrated with the utterly insane position otherwise decent and sensible Christians take regarding the State of Israel, the Jewish people and their religion. I have heard every argument known to man; with all of them either missing the point genetically (i.e. over DNA), theologically (i.e. with a warped view of eschatology and basic Christian doctrine), or just in terms of political reality. To debate with a Christian Zionist is akin to attempting to debate with the closed minded of a deeply sincere yet equally deeply deluded leftist. Barriers go up and emotional rhetoric replaces clear thought and reason, much to the detriment of Christ and His Kingdom, as well as to the spiritual position of the poor soul who has been brainwashed by this cynical and deliberate perversion of scripture. This is why I felt led by God to grasp this thorny issue and tear down the wall of cowardly silence once and for all - no matter what criticism I may have to endure for so doing. I pray that I deal fairly and honourably as I attempt to destroy this pernicious abomination of a pseudo-theological position, which has beguiled so many good and decent Christians for more than a hundred years. What then, is the truth about Dispensationalism and the idea of the Rapture? These ideas have a powerful grip on evangelical Christianity, and a growing presence even among some American Catholics, but are they soundly based on the Bible and on true, traditional Christianity? The answer is, most definitely, ‘no’! The sad and rather strange reality is that this intoxicating heresy is a well-thought-out deception that evolved from the horrors of the 17th-century Counter-Reformation and first spread through the door-to-door Bible salesmen of the American Mid-West in the 1920s. The latter had no idea of the poisonous nature of the heresy they were helping to go viral through the Scofield Bible and the doorstep easy payment plans so popular at the time. More recently, Hollywood (long known for its deeply anti-Christian ethos) took the idea global with Hal Lindsey’s Left Behind movie and book franchise. Hal Lindsey is as much a teller of fairy tales as Dan Brown; in fact, you would be better off reading Harry Potter fantasies than paying any heed to these two masters of deception. Both men wrote utter nonsense that was eagerly devoured by millions of people, mainly those who were theologically ignorant or brainwashed or, as usual, the legions of hysterical womenfolk against whom the Bible so often warns us. Sadly, The Da Vinci Code, despite being utter nonsense, is almost sensible compared to the whole Dispensationalist/Rapture fake theology that so many good Christians have swallowed these last 100 years. May I remind you, dear reader, of the warning we should heed from our Lord: ‘For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.’ Matt 24:24 The warning is very apt when applied to Christian Zionism. This both a heresy and a political movement that embraces the most extreme ideological positions of Zionism, the last surviving member of the crop of extreme nationalist, fascist movements that germinated in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and first four decades of the twentieth. It not only works to the detriment of the Christian minority in Israel, it also threatens to spark World War Three. The Origins of Christian Zionism The origins of Christian Zionism lie in the comparatively recent theology of Dispensationalism, an approach to biblical interpretation that emerged in 19th-century England, largely through the efforts of Irish Anglican ministers Louis Way and John Nelson Darby. What is much less well-known is the fact that the idea itself goes back way further, to the machinations of the Jesuits in their life or death struggle with the Protestant world in the bloody Counter-Reformation of the 17th Century. Dispensationalism asserts that the world will experience a period of worsening tribulations until Christ returns. Darby added the doctrine of ‘Rapture’ whereby ‘born-again Christians’ would be literally whisked up and transferred to Heaven immediately prior to the Second Coming. This fantasy is one of the things that have made some American presidents, including Ronald Reagan, quite prepared to press the button for nuclear war. Not because geopolitical and strategic realities made it a necessary evil but because, ‘I and my fellow Believers are all going straight to Heaven anyway’. Which is why it isn’t some harmless eccentricity – this nonsense could get us all killed. Think on it this way: Since God made the World and Mankind, who is more likely to fancy a nice little nuclear war – God or Satan? Christian Zionism moved to the USA, where Dispensationalist teaching spread quickly. Dispensationalist theology was popularised in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a number of well-financed Protestant theologians, including the evangelist Dwight Moody, C.I. Schofield and William E. Blackstone. Christian Zionism is grounded on an interpretation of the Bible that supports the ingathering of all Jews to Israel and their exclusive claim to the whole land of Palestine. Based on the gift of the Land to Abraham and the Jewish people as the ‘chosen people’, it sees the establishment of the State of Israel, the rebuilding of the Third Temple, the rise of the Antichrist and the build-up of armies poised to attack Israel, as among the signs leading to Armageddon and the Return of Jesus. John Hagee. Denying Traditional Doctrine and Monetising Heresy! Pastor John Hagee heads ‘Christians United for Israel’, which he established in 2006. Hagee has denounced replacement theology, the ancient and traditional doctrine whereby all true Christians - Roman Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox alike - believe that Christians replaced the Jews as the Chosen People, forever, after the Jews refused to follow Him and demanded His crucifixion. Evangelical leader Pat Robertson agrees with Hagee’s idolatrous worship of Israel, saying during a trip to the Holy Land: ‘The Jews are God’s chosen people. So Evangelical Christians stand with Israel. That is one of the reasons I am here.’ Lots of money was the other! The problem for the mega-rich TV evangelicals and their Zionist backers is that their claims can only be believed by people with a stunning ignorance of the Bible. Because the real position can be judged from the clear message in Galatians 6. This crucial part of the New Testament makes it clear that, from the time the Jews broke the Covenant and rejected Jesus, the true Israel has been a spiritual entity: 14 But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. 15 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. 16 And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. Hence the true Israel of our times, and of all times, is not the Jews, with their adherence to their viciously anti-Christian Talmud, but the faithful followers of His Church. The true Israel for two thousand years has been based not on Jewish bloodlines but on faith in Christ. He is the only way! Share Far from being in some way the ‘older brother’ of Christianity, the religious faith of modern Israel - being based on the Talmud - features the most disgusting blasphemies against Christ, who it calls the ‘the hanged one’. This supposedly religious tome gleefully lists the vile punishments it says Jesus now endures in Hell, including boiling in excrement. Despite this anti-Christian hatred and the virulent racism of those running the Israeli state, many Christian Zionists often claim that Americans (and Britons for that matter) are obligated to back the policies of its government, or harm will come to them and our countries. They hijack Genesis 12:3 to support this pseudo-religious protection racket: ‘I will bless those who bless you and him who curses you, I will curse’. Christian Zionist Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority organised a powerful voting bloc during the 1980s and was credited with giving Ronald Reagan the winning edge in the 1980 elections. One of the Moral Majority’s founding principles was ‘support for Israel and Jewish people everywhere.’ To this huge electoral clout is added the power of the Zionist lobby, the influence of the overwhelmingly Jewish-owned mass media, and the control of many top politicians through pressure, such as the video files of the Mossad-created Epstein paedophile honey trap. Taken together, this accounts for the slavish devotion shown by successive US administrations to Israel and the vast amounts of US taxpayers’ money paid annually to Tel Aviv in tribute. This is despite that Israel’s close alliance with Islamist extremist Saudi Arabia, shocking record of spying on its US sugar daddy and the terror attack on the USS Liberty. On top of that, the fascist Israeli state has been heavily involved in every Deep State effort to use hoaxes such as non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction and false flag attacks to try to drag America and Britain into war for the racist and fascist Likud regime in Iraq, Syria and Iran. However much we oppose the equally false doctrines of - and the grave threats posed by - Islamism, knowing these facts, no true Christian nationalist can support the Zionist state either. Having explained why such a seemingly obscure piece of pseudo-theological claptrap is in fact so important, I turn now to a more in-depth account of how the Dispensationalist heresy - and hence the modern obsession with Zionism - first originated. This unavoidably involves raking over the embers of the old conflagration between Catholics and Protestants, which is done not with any intention to assign blame or rekindle past tensions, but in order to get to the historical facts. Today the main carriers of the Dispensationalist virus are the Protestant denominations, but for two hundred years the main carriers hailed from the Jesuit Order of the Roman Church. Therefore, this is not a ‘they caused it’ blame game, but rather than a ‘we were all fooled’ reality check. I ask that it is read in a spirit of love and mutual respect between Catholic and Protestant readers. Being fooled is normal, remaining a fool is a sin, so read on and the truth shall set you free. Identity of the Anti-Christ From the very beginning of Protestantism, many of its adherents believed that the identity of the Antichrist is revealed in the prophecies which are found within the books of Daniel and Revelation, as well as the Apostle Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonian Church, in which verses 2 and 3 describe the Antichrist as ‘the man of sin’ and ‘son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.’ In reference to this passage of the Bible, Martin Luther wrote: ‘Oh Christ, my Master, look down upon us and bring upon us your day of judgment, and destroy the brood of Satan in Rome! There sits the Man, of whom the Apostle Paul wrote (2 Thess. 2:3,4) that he will oppose and exalt himself above all that is called God – that man of sin, that Son of Perdition.’ Most commentators agree that statements such as this were typical of the view held by the Reformers of the Papacy. According to Edward Hendrie, author of Solving the Mystery of Babylon the Great: ‘The belief that the pope is the antichrist was once a virtually unanimous belief among Protestant denominations. In fact, the Westminster Confession of Faith (Church of England) states: “There is no other Head of the Church but the Lord Jesus Christ, nor can the Pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof, but is that antichrist, that man of sin, and Son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the Church against Christ and is called God”.’ Other Protestant confessions, including the Morland Confession of 1508 and 1535 (Waldenses) and the Swizz Helvetic Confession of 1536, also identified the Pope as the Antichrist. Today, those who hold such a belief are in the minority. In fact, nowadays it is viewed as uncharitable for a Christian to say that the Pope is the Antichrist. How did such a radical transformation take place among the Protestant denominations? The change in the position of the Protestant denominations toward Rome was the direct result of a concerted campaign by agents of the Roman Catholic Church. One of the methods used by the Roman Catholic theologians was to relegate the Book of Revelation to some future time. In 1590 a Roman Catholic priest, Francisco Ribera, published a five hundred page commentary on the Book of Revelation. In it, he placed the events of the book in a period in the future, just prior to the End of the World. He claimed the Antichrist would be an individual who would not be manifested until very near the End Time. He wrote that the Antichrist would rebuild Jerusalem, abolish Christianity, deny Christ, persecute the Church and dominate the world for three-and-a-half years. Another Jesuit, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, promoted Ribera’s teachings. Bellarmine was one of the most influential cardinals of his time. In 1930 he was canonised by the Vatican as a Saint and ‘Doctor of the Church’. This Catholic interpretation of the Book of Revelation did not become accepted in the Protestant denominations until a book entitled The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty was published in 1812, eleven years after the death of its author. The author of that book was another Jesuit, by the name of Emmanuel de Lacunza. Lacunza’s fully developed system played a major role in the later stages of the Counter-Reformation. Its purpose was to remove the stigma of the Antichrist from Rome. Born in 1731, the son of Charles and Josefa Diaz, wealthy merchants engaged in colonial trade between Lima and Chile, Manuel Lanunza entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1747. After the usual Jesuit training he was ordained to the priesthood in 1766. His developing ideas were first published in a 22-page tract known as The Anonymous Millennium which was widely circulated in South America (there is evidence that Lacunza did not authorise this publication and was annoyed by it). The tract gave rise to heated public debate, particularly in Buenos Aires. Lacunza’s opponents denounced him to the Inquisition, which banned the booklet. In 1790 Lacunza completed the three volumes of his major work, The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty (La venida del Mesías en gloria y majestad). Recognising that royal patronage was the surest guarantee that his work would be published and that he would be protected against his enemies, he made repeated attempts to obtain approval by the Spanish court, but in this he was unsuccessful. However, his book circulated in manuscript form in Spain and in the whole of South America. Despite the prohibition of the Inquisition, La venida del Mesías en gloria y majestad was secretly printed in Cadiz in 1810 or 1811 under the pseudonym Rabbi Juan Josaphat ben-Ezra. The use of a Jewish pen name has led to speculation that Lacunza Diaz was a ‘converso’, a member of a family who had feigned conversion to Catholicism in order to avoid the attentions of the Inquisition. Just as the Jesuits had wanted to convince people that the Antichrist would not be a pope, so this could explain Lucunza’s desire to convince his readers that the Antichrist would be a general falling away from faith, rather than an individual Jewish man. Whatever the author’s motivation, a second edition was printed in Spain in 1812 and a third, in Castiliano and funded by the Argentine General Manuel Belgrano, was published in London in 1816. In the same year the book was denounced before the Spanish courts and on January 15, 1819, the Spanish Inquisition ordered that the heretical book be removed from circulation. Further editions were, however, printed in Mexico in 1821/1822, in Paris in 1825, and again in London in 1826. Lacunza argued that the Biblical expressions ‘end of the age’ and ‘end of the world’ refer to two different times. He interpreted the ‘end of the age’ or ‘day of the Lord’ as merely the end of a phase of human history that would be closed by the coming of Christ and the beginning of His kingdom on Earth. At this time the living would be judged, and the Jews converted, after which a new society would be established for a thousand-year reign of justice and peace. He came to the conclusion that, while the ‘end of the world’ will be marked by the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement, this event would take place after the thousand years of Christ’s pacific earthly kingdom, at which the dragon would then be loosed, so that the nations might once again be deceived, at which fire then comes down from heaven and consumes the dragon, the beast and the false prophet in the ‘lake of fire’ (Rev. 20:9,10). Only after this would the ‘Last Judgment, the ultimate sentence’ of the ‘second death’ take place before the throne of God, as described in Revelation 22:11. According to Lacunza: ‘If the 20th chapter of the Apocalypse is to be literally understood, Jesus Christ himself with all his saints now risen, should actually to reign in Jerusalem over the whole orb of the earth, and that for a thousand years … It ought then be admitted, that those thousand years of the pacific kingdom of Jesus Christ, being passed in innocence, in goodness, and righteousness, the dragon will once again be loosed, and will return to deceive the whole world …’ As already mentioned, Lacunza’s interpretation of Biblical prophecy led him to believe that during the period before the ‘Day of the Lord’ there would be an apostasy within the Catholic Church which would make it part of a general system which he labelled Antichrist, in the sense that there would be a general ‘falling away’ in doctrine among the churches, resulting in moral apostasy. In this sense the Antichrist would be composed of ‘a moral antichristian body, composed of many individuals … animated by the same spirit’, which would consist of ‘seven false religions [that] should unite to make war against the body of Christ, and against Christ himself’ – which was in accordance with his personal interpretation of Revelation 13:1. In The Coming of the Messiah in Majesty and Glory, Lacunza compared his views on the Antichrist – that Antichrist was a general moral apostasy within the churches – with what he declared to be the ‘universally recognised’ view of his day: ‘This Antichrist is universally recognised as a king, or most potent monarch … It is commonly said, that he will take his origin from the Jews, and from the tribe of Dan … shall feign himself Messiah, and begin to perform so many and such stupendous works, that the fame thereof being soon spread abroad, the Jews shall fly from all parts of the world, and from all the tribes, to join themselves to him, and offer him their services … After Antichrist shall have conquered Jerusalem, he shall, with great ease, conquer the rest of the earth … ‘The ambition of this miserable and vilest Jew, shall not rest satisfied, by becoming the universal king of the whole earth … but he shall immediately enter into the impious and sacrilegious thought of making himself God, and the only God of the whole earth … Whereupon shall arise the most terrible, the most cruel perilous persecution against the church of Jesus Christ; and it shall last for three years and a half … Upon his death the church, and the whole world, shall begin to breathe again, everything reverting to a perfect calm, and a universal joy. ‘The Bishops, who had concealed themselves in mountains, shall return and resume their sees, accompanied by their clergy and some other Christian families, who had followed them in their voluntary exile. At this time shall come to pass, the conversion of the Jews, according to the universal spirit of the converters’. As a matter of fact, this view – that the Antichrist was an individual who would be a Jew – was first formed by fellow Jesuit Francisco Ribera in the latter part of the sixteenth century. It was a far from universal view on the identity of the Antichrist, as until this time it had been completely rejected by Protestants. Lacunza explained how this had changed: ‘In 1540, Basque knight Ignatius Loyola and a handful of followers received permission from Pope Pius III to form the order of the Jesuits, who would provide shock troops for an intellectual assault on Protestant beliefs. While the Roman curia maintained its traditional Augustinian reticence on things apocalyptic, it occurred to the Jesuits that the reformers were surprisingly vulnerable in this area. If they could show that Luther, Zwingli and Calvin had ignored the Apocalypse, they could cut the ground from under Protestant feet and present themselves as the defender of scripture. ‘Their immediate task was to break the connection between Antichrist and the papacy. In around 1580, Spanish Jesuit Francisco Ribera began work on a commentary on Revelation, which challenged the ‘historical’ Protestant analysis of biblical prophecy. Abandoning the literal thousand year millennium, he focused on Daniel’s ‘a time, two times, and half a time,’ if ‘a time’ represented a year, he concluded, then the period added up to three and a half years – or 1260 days. ‘Uncoupling Daniel from Revelation, he argued that only John’s letters to the churches [in the Book of Revelation] in the first three chapters referred to events that happened in the past. All the rest … lay in the future and would be accomplished within the coming three and a half years of Tribulation. Since the papacy was timeless, it followed that the Antichrist had to be a single, identifiable human being, who had yet to arrive. ‘Citing Western and Eastern Church fathers, Ribera argued that this destroyer would be a Jew who would appear in Jerusalem, rebuild Solomon’s Temple, accept the worship of the Jewish people, before ruling for that terrible period of three and a half years. This Antichrist would finally claim divine power and conquer the world while locusts in the form of barbarian races wreaked havoc on the human race. As the church fled into the wilderness, six heavenly trumpets would blow, with the last sounding the end of Tribulation after the Antichrist’s death. ‘Although Protestants reacted with alarm, Ribera’s apocalyptic vision found no immediate favour in the Vatican. While he had taken care to describe the papacy of his own time as the ‘mother of piety, pillar of the Catholic faith and witness of sanctity,’ he did admit that, it had in the past been the Whore of Babylon and he predicted that it would apostatise at the end of time. Still respected Jesuit Cardinal Bellarmine set about importing Riberas’ key concepts of the individual Jewish Antichrist and the three-and-a-half-year tribulation into mainstream Catholic theology. ‘Positioning the Roman church as the defender of scripture, he publicised the reformer’s doubts on whether the two apocalyptic books of Daniel and the Revelation had any place in the Bible and even suggested a way in which the name ‘Luther’ could be converted to the beast’s symbol, 666. As Protestants clung to ‘historical’ methods of prophetic analysis, Cardinal Bellarmine steered Catholic apocalyptic towards events that were to be fulfilled in the future.’ Interesting as they are for the theologically-minded, Lacunza’s ideas would probably have been confined in harmless obscurity in a few dusty old libraries, had it not been for one Rev. Edward Irving. Irving, who formed the Catholic Apostolic Church in London after being expelled from the Presbyterian Church for ‘speaking in tongues’, came across Lacunza’s work after its publication in London. He had already begun to learn Spanish by allowing a refugee Spanish officer to tutor him as a way of helping the man. He was so impressed with the book that he spent the summer of 1826 translating it into English. In 1827 his two-volume translation was published under the title The Coming of the Messiah in Majesty and Glory. Irving rejected Lacunza’s personal view that there would be a general moral apostasy within the Church; instead he readily accepted Ribera’s view, which taught that the Antichrist would be a ‘Jewish destroyer’ who would wreak havoc upon the earth. In Death of the Church Victorious Ovid Need Jr. confirms that although the Jesuits had tried to introduce their Counter-Reformation black propaganda into Protestant theology several times over more than a century, they were not successful until Presbyterian Pastor Edward Irving read Lacunza’s work under the pseudonym of ‘Ben Ezra, A Converted Jew’ and then translated it into English: ‘The pressure was on Rome, especially with the word of God in the hands of the average person. So in order to turn the blame away from the Papacy, the Roman Catholic Jesuits started teaching that the Antichrist was some future individual that would come at the end of time.’ According to church historian Le Roy Froom, this interpretation of ‘the Futurist view of an individual Jewish Antichrist was unknown among the Protestants of North America prior to the nineteenth century.’ This, however, was changed as Irving’s translation and ideas about it spread. Irving added to Lacunza’s basic system the idea of a Pre-Tribulation Rapture, a concept he took not from the Bible but from the ramblings of an amateur Scottish theologian by the name of Margaret Macdonald. His 1827 work was adopted by the Plymouth Brethren. This novel version of ‘Christianity’ was then picked up by a former Anglican, John Nelson Darby, who met Irving at a conference in Powerscourt in Ireland. Under Darby, Ben Ezra’s ideas and subsequent additions developed into a comprehensive theory, which gave a literal interpretation to theology and eschatology. Anglo-Irish theologian John Nelson Darby’s perceptions of the second advent of Christ were largely responsible for the formation of British Premillennialism, which then formed the basis of Futurist Dispensationalism. This forms the basis of the prophetic mode of Biblical interpretation known as Futurism. Darby’s ideas were in turn systematised by Cyrus Ingerson Scofield (1843–1921) whose Reference Bible then spread the modern heresy through various denominations and Middle America like wildfire. The Scofield Bible had notes which inserted Premillennialism and the Futurist system of prophetic interpretation into the popular King James Version of the Bible. Well-trained and aggressive sales teams, armed with easy-terms payment offers, sold these door-to-door all over the USA. Cyrus Scofield - Conman and Puppet When one understands the baneful influence of these doctored Bibles on American foreign policy and world affairs, it seems almost incredible that the whole thing was just an accident. Digging a little deeper, it is therefore no surprise to find that it was not. Two years after Scofield’s reported conversion to Christianity in 1879, the Atchison Patriot gave an early glimpse of the man’s real character. Describing the former Atchison resident as the ‘late lawyer, politician and shyster generally,’ the newspaper went on to recount a few of Scofield’s ‘many malicious acts.’ These included a series of forgeries in St. Louis, for which he served six months in jail. His crooked record did not, however, preclude Scofield from becoming a member of an exclusive New York men’s club in 1901. In his devastating biography, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Joseph M. Canfield suggests, ‘The admission of Scofield to the Lotus Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C.I. Scofield.’ That someone, Canfield suspects, was associated with one of the club’s committee members, the Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. As Canfield points out, Scofield’s fake theology was ‘most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects—the Zionist Movement.’ Others have been even more explicit about the reason for Scofield’s position. In Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem, Prof. David W. Lutz writes, ‘Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas City lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.’ Introduced to Scofield by the top-level American-Zionist Untermeyer, Jacob Schiff, of Kuhn Loeb & Co, helped fund the research and production of his heretical Reference Bible. With the creation of a highly-trained sales network and the credibility that came from appearing next to the authentic Biblical text, Scofield’s notes had a huge impact. Without their pernicious influence, American presidents influenced by Christian Zionism, such as Truman, Johnson, Reagan and George W. Bush might have been less sympathetic to the demands of a foreign power, and more attentive to U.S. interests. Pseudo-Religious ‘Rapture’ The ridiculous Rapture idea became a significant source for popular pseudo-religious writers such as Tim LaHaye and Hal Lindsey, who was the author of the best-selling book The Late, Great Planet Earth, first published in 1970. Even more damage to the true interest of American taxpayers and the parents of the young soldiers killed and maimed in a series of totally unnecessary wars, has been done by the televangelists and other grifter-preachers who latched on to Christian Zionism. John Hagee, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell are just three of the most notorious of the hucksters who seized on the 19th century heresy as the ultimate career- and profit-booster. The whole sorry affair handed men who hold America in contempt an extraordinarily powerful weapon to mislead good God-fearing Christians into acting as cheer leaders for a foreign power, for an apostate religion and for an alien race, all to the detriment of our people and more important still, detrimental to the one true faith found only in Christ Jesus - who they despise as much today as they did in AD 33. The hordes of brainwashed ‘Christians’ who visit the Israeli state every year are kept well away from another group of people who have suffered grievously from this, one of the most audacious and effective con-jobs in History. For among the many victims of the Scofield Bible are five million Palestinian refugees, whose right to live in peace in their own ancestral homeland is fervently opposed by America’s Zionised Christians. Thanks to their indoctrination by Scofield’s unholy perversion of the Good Book, they believe that Palestine belongs not to the Palestinians - many of whom are fellow Christians and who feel the sting of Zionist oppression just as strongly as do their Muslim neighbours - but exclusively to a people whose own ‘Book’ spews eternal hatred towards Jesus Christ. As for the evils the one-sided relationship with the Zionist State brings to the USA, the outrageous costs in terms of gold, blood and reputation may be uncovered by anyone with an inquiring mind and an hour to spend online; do your own research and decide for yourself. The total bill rises with every day that goes by, and is sure to get very much higher under the rule of the allegedly Catholic and self-confessed Zionist Joe Biden and his ultra-Zionist Deputy. [Note: This was written in 2021. Sadly, it holds true under the present regime as well. NG] In his farewell address to the people of the United States, George Washington warned that: ‘A passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite Nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens, (who devote themselves to the favorite nation) facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.’ If Americans are reluctant to listen to me, I hope that they will at least give careful thought to that warning from one of the greatest of the Founding Fathers. And I earnestly pray that God will excuse my rather paltry attempts to impart the truth to you and that instead he send the Holy Spirit to do what I cannot and that is to give you clarity in these matters and clear direction. If I was not fully convinced with my life on these matters I would never have written them, so I urge you to take heed of the monstrous deception that is Christian Zionism, the great danger it presents to our world and the damage it has done to our faith. End Times? Are we near to the End of the World? It is not for us to know, for – as Jesus Himself tells us in Matthew 24:36: ‘But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.’ It is certainly not for mortal men to run around trying to speed the day by meddling in world affairs or plotting to bomb Syria or Iran and start a nuclear war with Russia – a nation which these days is far more of a Christian state than is America, the atheist European Union or the fatuous halfway house that is the increasingly Disunited Kingdom. But while it is not our place to try to hasten the End Times, much of what is going on around us does indeed suggest that they are nearly upon us. Great deceptions and strong delusions do indeed consume most of those whom today profess Christ, so we who still cling to the True Faith must be vigilant and alert, study hard and hold onto the truth. The precise relationship between the Great Reset and the earlier manifestations of globalism touched upon in this essay would be interesting to know. But it is not something that really matters to us. Whatever Satan is up to with such greedy and arrogant elitists, we can be sure that, in the end, his and their plans will be thwarted by a Power infinitely greater than theirs. Our task, as individuals and together, is to put our own lives in order, to raise children who also trust the Lord, to build communities that strive to keep His Commandments. To be ready to fight His good fight if he calls upon us to do so, or to answer before His Throne if that is His Will. James Dowson B.Th MA This essay was first published as a chapter in Deus Vult - The Great Reset Resistance. Still availabable HERE https://templarstore.com/product/deus-vult-the-great-reset-resistance/