opinion 'For Zion’s Sake': Exposing the morphing reality of evil

A few weeks ago in Southern California, Emmy-award-winning actress Patricia Heaton, Orthodox Jewish activist Shabbos Kestenbaum of PragerU, Christian Zionist Marziyeh Amirizadeh, who faced a death sentence by hanging in Iran for being a Christian, co-founder of the Judeo-Christian Zionist Congress, Calev Myers and others gathered for an event under the banner “For Zion’s Sake” (Isaiah 62:1).

The event’s rallying cry was: “Truth is under attack. Anti-Semitism is rising. Courage is required. Now is not the time for silence!”

As a pastor in California for forty years, organizing numerous gatherings against anti-Semitism and in support of Israel, I found this year to be the most intense in opposition and attack.

To be clear, that opposition is, for me, a badge of honor.

But the point is there is an elephant in the room that must be recognized. Israel and Christians face a common enemy. There is a darkness behind the darkness.

Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco, in his book The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, writes, “A gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it.”

Visibility of evil?

Israel’s existence in its ancestral homeland does more than testify to the enduring connection of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to their land.

Its very existence exposes evil whose roots are clearly visible in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament but have become largely invisible to Western civilization today.

Patricia Heaton told of how she was horrified by October 7 but also utterly shocked and even baffled by the silence in churches and on university campuses in its aftermath. And this silence in response to October 7 was followed by the global hatred unleashed on October 8.

What’s going on?

It is not enough today to see the world strictly in terms of material forces. Not everything has a natural scientific explanation.

While the devil is not behind every bush that moves, the big mistake would be to either dismiss the behind-the-scenes spiritual reality altogether or to exaggerate it to the point of attributing a demonic origin to every flickering light.

Evil is real. There is a clear force that magnifies, complicates, and perpetuates evil. In light of God’s promise, “I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you,” it stands to reason that this force, whom we call Satan, would love to see not only Israel cursed but the nations.

So, the father of lies foments the idea that everything is Israel’s fault! Curse Israel! Curse the Zionists! It’s a lose-lose proposition, and the darkness behind the darkness wins the day.

So we see in the U.S. the mindless championing of an “America First” policy, wrapping oneself in patriotism and promises of prosperity, only to turn around and blame Israel for America’s problems, as Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed embodies.

I see a troubling progression of evil, morphing from the new anti-Semitism into anti-Zionism (the denial of Israel as the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people and the delegitimization of its enduring connection to Jerusalem, fueled by the rhetoric of the Palestinian-liberation scam)—and extending into a darkness that strikes at the very heart of the Christian faith: the new anti-Zionism is anti-Christ! How?

“Christ” means “Anointed One,” or Messiah, referring to the promised Davidic King who will reign in Zion, or Jerusalem. When anti-Zionism denies God’s enduring purposes for Israel, it strikes at the heart of the biblical story that reveals the Messiah and His reign from Zion.

Jesus won the war on the cross, but battles remain.

Our best defense is to continually return to Scripture to be equipped for the fight and to prayer for the discernment and strength we need in these times.

King David wrote, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Amidst heightened demonic darkness, Jesus answered with the Hebrew Scriptures: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”

After all, the very civilization that the death cults of Islamic extremism want to destroy was built by the Bible. As Dr. Vishal Mangalwadi wrote in his landmark book, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, “The Bible …is the very foundation of Western civilization.”

Pastor Mike Evans, founder of the Friends of Zionist Heritage Center in Jerusalem, recently said in the context of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that there is a “battle against principalities and powers” and that “you cannot kill a demon with a bullet.”

Pastor Evans knows the power of prayer.

Just a few weeks ago, he spearheaded a twenty-four-hour prayer at the Western Wall, broadcast to 176 countries and seen by over 250 million people worldwide.

The prophet Isaiah put it this way: “You who make mention of the Lord, do not keep silent, and give Him no rest till He establishes and till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.” (Isaiah 62:6-7)

I love how Actress Patricia Heaton ended her message at our “For Zion’s Sake” outreach in Southern California:

“You know, you may lose friends in this, but the ones you gain are a thousand times better than the ones you’ve lost.… You may be a seed planter. You may be a seed waterer. You may be a harvester. We don’t know where we are. We just know that all we have to say is, ‘Lord, Here I am, send me. Use me in this fight for Your people, for our civilization, for the world, for our beautiful Savior.’”

Amen!