SINCE OCTOBER 7, 2023, a growing number of Christians have concluded that we should not support Israel for reasons ranging from theft of the land from native Arabs to the church replacing Israel in end times prophecy.

We disagree. While we acknowledge that Israel is ruled by fallen, sinful humans just like every other nation on Earth, and we affirm that all have sinned and will not go to the Father except through Jesus, we also recognize that Islam has a 1,400-year history of bloody conquest in its wake. Arabs and Jews have been trying to negotiate a two-state solution since at least 1936, even though the land “from the river to the sea” was promised to the Zionist movement by the League of Nations in 1920 (Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant; the British Mandate for Palestine was approved by the League of Nations Sept. 16, 1922).

The bottom line is this: A plain reading of verses like Isaiah 54, Romans 11:1–5, and Zechariah 12:8–10 make clear that a day is coming when a remnant of the Jews in Jerusalem “will look on Me, on Him whom they have pierced, [and] they shall mourn for Him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over Him, as one weeps over a firstborn.”

In context, it’s clear that those verses do not apply to the church—they are directed specifically at Israel and the Jews.