Western Wall
Standing on a hill just outside Jerusalem, author Michael Onifer explained what his newest book says about the land all around him.
“The main message is that Israel isn’t about Israel; Israel’s about God,” Onifer told CBN’s Chris Mitchell on “Jerusalem Dateline.”
“That understanding Israel and the Jewish people and what’s happening here in this land today, in this region, ultimately has to do with the knowledge of God and our personal, intimate relationship with Jesus.”
Onifer wrote “God, Israel, and You: The Scandalous Story of a Faithful God” specifically for the millennial generation. He said he spent the past 10 years cultivating a message on Israel for young adults. What he discovered was that it’s best to place Israel in the larger context of God’s plan.
“What we’re seeing is that when millennials hear a message on Israel that they can connect with, they get it, because God set a plan in motion,” Onifer said. “God has a redemptive plan and we exist within redemptive history.”
Onifer, who directs the Bethlehem Project, said millennials who have read his book have generally responded most strongly to his message on Israel’s relationship to the Palestinian community and the larger Arab world. Onifer said he tried to help young Christians think about the issue in a broader biblical and historical context. He also tried to display the heart that he has for the Palestinian people.
“[My book] takes the Arab people and it puts them within their redemptive purpose,” Onifer revealed. “A lot of times you have people that have a challenge with certain leaders in the body of Christ that speak about the Arab community as if they’re cursed, and that’s not God’s heart, and this book talks about that.”
Onifer said there are two groups of people on Earth he feels are most important to God’s plan. The first is the Jewish people, and the second is the Arab people – because of their historical and geographical relationship to the Jewish people. He believes that, far from being cursed, the Arab people have a redemptive purpose.
“I believe their purpose is the same purpose you and I have, [which] is to know Jesus and to identify with Jesus and His kingdom more than we identify with any personal or political narrative,” Onifer declared.
The author said “God, Israel, and You” invites believers to think critically about the spiritual dynamics at work in the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts. This allows readers to do the difficult job of “separating an individual from an ideology.”
“So when I go to the checkout counter at Wal-Mart and there’s a young woman there in a hijab, what is my heart toward that individual?” Onifer asked for purposes of illustration. “And what is my understanding of Islam? And being able to understand there’s a difference, and we need to be able to appreciate both.”
Onifer hopes his book will stir millennials to bring their priorities into harmony with God’s priorities as revealed in the Bible, especially regarding Israel and the Jewish people.
“I hope that it takes that first simple yet profound step of helping a believer understand that Israel and the Jewish people have to do with the heart of Jesus, that this is not a peripheral issue, but God in His wisdom has bound his plans and his redemptive purposes to this land and to the Jewish people,” the author said.
Mitchell, the CBN interviewer, remarked that he remembered once asking the late Bible teacher Derek Prince why anyone should support Israel. Prince replied, “Because God supports Israel.”
Onifer said he agrees wholeheartedly with what Prince said, and he recalled another of Prince’s sayings.
“He said if you don’t understand Israel, you can’t understand the Bible,” Onifer relayed. “And if we’re misunderstanding the Bible, we’re misunderstanding God. And so Israel could very well make the difference between Western believers worshipping a Western conception of Jesus versus the biblical Jesus.”
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