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This is my fifteenth, and final, in the series, highlighting key aspects from each chapter of my 2025 book, While We Were Sleeping: A Wake-up Call for All Christians. (Check out my YouTube channel where I am posting a reflection on each chapter, to complement these posts.)

Teri Kempe has been a long-time supporter and writer for The Daily Declaration, and she became my editor for While We Were Sleeping after giving me her testimony for this chapter.

She was born in London but emigrated to Australia at 16. Teri has been a missionary volunteer in Fiji, and in 2013 Teri was invited onto the Fiji branch of the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ).

The rest, as they say, is history. Her love of and support for Israel had been ignited! Here are some snapshots from her testimony:

“I volunteered with ICEJ for ten years. Their mandate is, ‘comfort, yes, comfort My people’ (Isaiah 40:1), to comfort the Jews. They are extremely careful not to proselytise, being very conscious of the historical persecution of the Jews by Christians going right back to the Crusades, and the Holocaust.

“I could not have prepared myself for the impact of going to Israel in 2014. It was absolutely life changing. I have an arts degree in Biblical Studies, I have studied the archaeology of Israel, and I was very familiar with the Bible. I had read the Bible many, many times, even though I only became a Christian at 16. The Lord had regularly spoken to me through the Word. But when I went to Israel, suddenly the Bible came even more alive!

“To me the Word of God is very precious and the fact that the Jewish people have preserved it for us, means we owe them a great debt of gratitude. I was beginning to realise they were the vehicle God has used, and the Jewish people have had that responsibility.”

Teri Kempe’s connection with Israel is profound. She would emphatically claim that this connection has been orchestrated by God. She was not looking for Israel, Israel found her.

In order for us to understand the importance of Israel, from a faith and political perspective, let’s review some of the facts, and some of the history of the Arab–Jew conflict.

History of the Arab–Jew Conflict

The landmass of current Israel is tiny, one of the smallest sovereign nations in the world. At its narrowest point it is only 14 km E to W, and 424 km N to S.

Most of us will be familiar with biblical history, but let me highlight a few key features. In about 1000 BC, King David’s kingdom was established, with Jerusalem the capital, where King Solomon built the First Temple around 957 BC.

In 515 BC there was the great return from Babylonian exile (Ezra 6), funded by the Babylonians (the Persian Empire — modern day Iran — specifically King Cyrus), and the Second Hebrew Temple was established.

The Romans invaded in 63 BC, and the land of Judea becomes a vasal state to the Roman Empire. The Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. So, for the majority of biblical history, the land of Israel was the land of the Hebrews, the Jewish people.

There was a massive revolt by the Jews against the Romans in 132–136 AD known as the Bar Kochba Revolt, which was nearly successful, but in the aftermath, the Romans renamed Israel, ‘Palestine’ as an insult to the Jews, after their arch enemy the Philistines.

The religion of Islam was not founded until the 7^th Century AD, when the Arabs took over the land in 636 AD. The Crusades followed, a series of religious wars initiated by the medieval papacy, as a response to the expansion of Islam and the desire to reclaim the Holy Land for Christians. By 1291 the Crusaders were finally defeated, and the Muslim Ottoman Empire was established from 1517–1918.

Then, on 14^th May 1948 it happened, the State of Israel was declared! Here is the start of the declaration pronounced on that day:

“ERETZ-ISRAEL (the Land of Israel) was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom…”

Whose land is it — the Jews or the Arabs? The law of first occupation would give it to the Jews, since 1000 BC, and the law of longest tenure would also go to the Jews, 11 centuries verses four centuries for the Arabs.

It must be said that most Muslims would prefer to coexist alongside, or within, a Jewish state, respecting their borders, rather than fight over it. But Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)’s, with its proxies, the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas are hell-bent on the annihilation of all Jews, and the State of Israel. The IRGC’s mission is to eradicate the ‘Great Satan,’ the United States, and the ‘Little Satan,’ Israel.

Replacement Theology

Replacement Theology, also known as Supersessionism, argues that the Jews are no longer the people of God and that the promises made to Israel physically in the Old Testament, are now only to be interpreted spiritually and metaphorically as applying to the Christian Church. Passages like Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek”) and Romans 9:6 (“For they are not all Israel who are of Israel”) have been taken out of context and interpreted to indicate God has finished with the Jews because they crucified Christ.

Pastor Gary Hamrick has been most strident in his rejection of Replacement Theology:

“The Catholic Church in the twelfth century believed this, and thus the Crusader Wars, marching through Europe slaughtering thousands of Jews and then headed into the Holy Land slaughtering thousands more and thousands of Muslims too in the process.

“In addition, Martin Luther did some great things, nailing his thesis on the door of the Wittenberg Church and starting the Protestant Reformation. But he also wrote a lot of anti-Semitic things, because he also believed in Supersessionism, that the church has replaced Israel, and that God no longer has any purpose for the Jewish people.

“Luther’s views were so anti-Semitic that Adolf Hitler hailed him in Mine Kampf, quoting him as reasons, in part, for the slaughtering of the Jews in WWII. We have to know our Bibles, as a wrong interpretation of one verse (Romans 9:6), has led to the slaughter of millions of Jews. God is not done with the Jewish people.”

I put it to you; on the one hand the West was repulsed by the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi Regime against the Jews in WWII. Yet on the other hand, we can find ourselves aligning with an underlying anti-Semitism that can be traced back to an error in an understanding of Scriptures first made by early Church leaders such as Irenaeus, Augustine, and Athanasius.

If this is true, it might partly explain the inordinate rise in anti-Semitism the West has seen since 7^th October 2023.

What About You?

What about your own church? Are there undercurrents of Replacement Theology to be found there? One way of examining this is to analyse the rhetoric from your church leadership.

If they are equivocal, unable to side with either Israel or the Palestinians, that probably indicates they are rusted on Replacement Theologians.

It seems to me that most Western churches have Replacement Theology in their DNA, despite rarely preaching on it, but it manifests in their silence on Israel.

As a result, many Christians fail to appreciate the importance of Israel in today’s world, on account of their Christian leaders not teaching on the significance of the Jewish homeland and God’s eternal purpose with Israel.

“Behold, He who keeps Israel

Shall neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper;

The Lord is your shade at your right hand.

The sun shall not strike you by day,

Nor the moon by night.

The Lord shall preserve you from all evil;

He shall preserve your soul.” (Psalm 121:4)

Many Christians, however, then hear the mainstream media (with its (Trump Derangement Syndrome) portraying President Donald Trump as the worst thing to happen to America and the world, the evil man that started the war with Iran, collaborating with the equally evil, President of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. They demonstrate they have little appreciation for biblical prophecy relating the last days, so they have nothing with which to counter this narrative.

In addition, this deceptive narrative feeds the neo-Marxist ideology that always attacks Judaeo-Christian values, capitalism, and the powerful, while supporting the underdog, the oppressed and the marginalised. (This is illustrated by Professor Gad Saad’s latest book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind).

As Christians we are naturally drawn to supporting the poor and vulnerable, which puts us in a dangerous place if we align ourselves with the secular neo-Marxist mindset.

So, it becomes natural, from a Replacement Theology stance, to sympathise with the Palestinian people who, they claim, have been the victims of Israeli genocide in Gaza, which in-turn feeds into the modern day anti-Semitism we have seen around the world and most recently here on Bondi Beach, Sydney.

So, what about you? Do you find yourself aligned with most Western Christians, caring for the marginalised, while seeking to resist the extremes of neo-Marxism, but equivocal about Israel and the Jews?

I put it to you: this position is not sustainable. If we implicitly accept Replacement Theology, we are mocking God, because we are suggesting that God has changed his mind.

“God is not a man, that He should lie,

Nor a son of man, that He should repent.

Has He said, and will He not do?

Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?” (Numbers 23:19)

And finally, we can only expect a blessing, as long as we are grafted into an Israel, that is alive and well (Romans 11: 11–31), not replacing Israel:

“I will bless those who bless you,

And I will curse him who curses you;

And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3)

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Image via Jim Twelves.