Celebrity Christians, Charging Through the Wide Gate
By Charles E. Carlson
In this series we examine outrageous scriptural errors of professing Christians. The most obvious examples of un-Christ-like statements in support of false values are heard, not so often from Jews and atheists, but in the words of American celebrity Christians as they publicly fawn over the State of Israel. By exposing a few of these errors it is our hope to do our part to recover followers of Christ from the camp of Christian-Zionism, as the apostle Paul was salvaged from Pharisaism two millenniums ago.
The Knesset Christian Allies Caucus announced: “On May 25, 2006, The Knesset Christian Allies Caucus presented the Newly Created KCAC Women’s Council Today in its First Meeting of the Seventeenth Knesset” (Israel’s parliament).
Kay Arthur, Chairman of KCAC Women’s Council, is the world famous leader of Precept Ministries, an enormously successful organization thriving on Christian seekers. Conservative radio talk-show host Janet Parshall, is the deputy chair of the international board.
Arthur spoke of the importance of Jews and Christians working together for the advancement of the status of women. Here is what Kay Arthur said to the Israeli parliament:
“You have the Tanach. We have the Bible. The word of God is our common ground”.
Kay Arthur’s compromise is pathetic. It shows that she does not fear God, she violates God by leaving the New Testament out of the biblical equation. As a professed Bible teacher, Kay Arthur should know the “Tanach” (Tanakh) is not God’s word to Christ-followers. It includes some of what Jesus called Satan’s words, and it does not contain His words. No, Jews and Christ’s followers do not worship the same “word of God”. The “Tanach” includes some Bible, but it also contains other books and oral opinions of the Rabbis and elders.
Without committed belief in the holiness of Jesus there is no Christianity. Arthur and Parshall would appear comical and bizarre if their view was not costing lives every day; it’s anything but harmless. The Israelis tolerate Kay Arthur because her brand of Zionized-Christianity promotes Israel, not Jesus Christ. We will show this to be true of many followers of Israel.
Followers of Jesus do not accept the strange notion that Israeli Jews will set foot in the kingdom of Heaven without believing in Jesus and following His teachings. Christians, including the Apostle Paul, believed that even Abraham knew about Jesus. Jesus condemned the Pharisees of His day, but Arthur extols them as God’s messengers.
Why would Kay Arthur, and a growing number like her, take God’s name in vain for the sake of a foreign country’s political agenda?
Answer: because she is a member of an alien theology that is falsely labeled “Christianity” that teaches Israel is the fulfillment of Biblical prophesy just as surely as is Jesus. She has stated in Israel, that if it “came to a choice of the USA or Israel” she would choose the latter. This is the essence of Zionized-Christianity, it is not of Christ, and it is of Jesus’ enemies.
We can tell that neither Israel nor American Jewish Zionists are of Christ by simply examining the corrupt State they have built. The vast majority of Israelis are agnostics. If Israel was of God it might do a lot better job of showing it. Many in the Knesset are proudly secular and deny any God, and certainly deny that Jesus Christ is Holy. Up to 85% of Israelis are secular.
Unfortunately, few Christian junketeers ever have seen the real Israel of Satan. Former President Carter is an exception. He is one who observed the latest election in the land of the Philistines, and spoke out passionately after coming home:
“Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. Because they voted for candidates who are members of Hamas, the United States government has become the driving force behind an apparently effective scheme of depriving the general public of income, access to the outside world and the necessities of life.”
When Jimmy Carter was President, this writer was a businessman, and I thought at the time he was terrible president, even though we were both Southern Baptists. But I like what he says now, and maybe Mr. Carter has also changed. He is the only past President to state that the man in the oval office is managed by others, especially in the area of war making. Mr. Carter continues:
“It is unconscionable for Israel, the United States and others under their influence to continue punishing the innocent and already persecuted people of Palestine. The Israelis are withholding approximately $55 million a month in taxes and customs duties that, without dispute, belong to the Palestinians.”
Philistine mothers are cooking on scraps of wood because they cannot buy fuel while the Israelis collect border taxes, phone taxes and other revenue and withhold it from them. No wonder they starve, they live in virtual jails, and are taxed by their jailers for essentials.
How many Americans led by the likes of John Hagee, Jerry Falwell, Kay Arthur and Ted Haggard, who all claim to be followers of Christ, support this brutality against the helpless? All of them!
One kind and gentle answer is Americans don’t know and they trust leaders like Kay Arthur who claim to know. The leaders look the other way and make sure their consciences are not pricked by any fact of life in Philistia.
Dispensational “Christians” and American politicians are sheltered from seeing ordinary Palestinian families in a desperate near starving condition in their homes. President Carter has seen this, which is why his words are packed with honest emotion.
This author experienced a first hand example of Israeli censorship several years ago when I had a private conversation with a then conservative Congressman, Matt Salmon.
Salmon was proud that he had just returned from an Israel sponsored junket to Gaza where he met with Yassar Arafat in Gaza, and Arial Sharon in Tel Aviv. Congressman Salmon explained the security afforded to him in Gaza, where he told me with some pride, he had traveled the inside an armored personnel carrier with titanium walls two inches thick to ward off Palestinian rockets. Of course the Philistines do not have any such rockets. The problem was the Congressman could not see out. It seems the sheltered Congressman did not see one person in Gaza, except those the Israeli Defense Force wanted and carefully planned for him to see. He was kept behind his titanium curtain.
I have seen now deceased Yassar Arafat’s lovely rambling stucco home in Gaza City on the Mediterranean where Salmon met with him. It has long and high wall and the tall bougainvillea hedges around it. I saw the gate where Congressman Salmon and his entourage might have entered. Once inside the enclave they would see only the Mediterranean, with not a Palestinian would be visible in the half-mile of sea front. I wonder if the Congressman was not wise enough to realize he had been blindfolded in Gaza City so he would never see Philistine children, mothers, farms, fields or markets.
Christian junketeers are also blindfolded. Collective censorship surrounds every Christian junket… always in the name of safety from the dreaded Philistines. Christian junketeers do not ride pubic buses with dozens of armed soldiers on board. I never met another American on a bus; they were enjoying junkets in charted buses with Israeli guides.
I once met a Canadian pair, seasoned travelers, who told me they had abandoned one such junket in disgust after tiring of being “led by the noses.” They went their own way. After 24 hours in the land of “God’s chosen” they grabbed a cab to the airport and flew home, never so happy to be in the air leaving an unfriendly and hostile tribe behind. Had they gone to Gaza they would have been made welcome, as I was, by people who had little and wanted to give it to you, grateful that someone had come to see.
But the Israelis do not make you welcome when you go through their gate into occupied territory. A young soldier at Ariz gate asked me “why would you want to go in there?” His words were dropped with practiced indifferent detachment, as though he sincerely wondered why an American on foot would do anything so illogical. His tone was as though I had asked to tour the sewer. He stopped just short of telling me Arabs are animals.
Israelis are schooled to think all non-Jews are animals. Civilians often volunteer those very words. When touring Israel alone, one quickly feels worse than alone. In contrast, the Philistines opens their doors to the stranger, hoping someone will see and tell of the gulag in which they live.
I walked into Gaza carrying my backpack by the same Ariz Gate where Congressman Salmon entered, where I could not avoid seeing. He allowed himself to be sheltered and censored behind an opaque titanium wall; so does each Zionized-Christian leader, including Kay Arthur.
Kay Arthur, by her acts of support for the Knesset, denies Jesus Christ the peacemaker. Israel does not practice “an eye for an eye.” It takes five eyes for every one; not a tooth for a tooth, but ten for one. Its system is to taunt, then publicize, any reaction such as a homemade rocket that rarely hits anything. Recently a Jewish paper carried an account of one of these rocket attacks that hit a Israeli chicken coop and killed thirty odd chickens. So rare is damage that dead chickens make headlines, but not dead Palestinian children.
After each provoked attack Israel takes massive reprisals. And the cycle repeats over and over, year after year. Israel goes far beyond Hitler’s formula in occupied France because the latter did not taunt those he occupied in hopes they would first attack him, as the Israelis do. According to Amnesty International’s recent account, carried by Jewish press, reprisals are currently running about 5 to 1, and 8 to 1 for children.
Brutality and reprisals are part of Israelis interpretation of the “Tanach,” as Kay Arthur refers to the first five books of the Hebrew Old Testament, plus a mixture of added Rabbinic theology. Old Hebrew brutality and retribution bears no likeness to Jesus’ call for solving hatred by loving ones’ neighbors…even ones enemies. Jesus teaches only peace. The Tanach and the “Bible” are not the same because Jesus is only in the latter.
WHITEWASHING ISRAELI PAGAN LIFE STYLE
KCAC Women’s Council member, Rev. Cheryl Hauer, of the U.S. branch of the Jerusalem-based Bridges for Peace, stated:
“the more a society embraces Judeo-Christian values, the less likely women are to be abused.”
Bridges for Peace, Rebecca Brimmer, Chairman, is by its own words radically anti-Arab, with damming news items plastering its website about Arabs all over the Mideast. The food and financial aid it collects for and dispenses exclusively to Israelis, never to Arabs. Therefore, BFP is racist by its nature. BFP’s statement of principles does not contain a single word about seeking peace between Israelis and its neighbors. Bridges for Peace goals are pure Zionism, they say nothing about “Peace”, but promote more war:
*To encourage meaningful and supportive relationships between Christians and Jews in Israel and around the world.
*To educate and equip Christians to identify with Israel, the Jewish people, and the biblical/Hebraic foundations of our Christian faith.
*To bless Israel and the Jewish people in Israel and worldwide, through practical assistance, volunteer service, and prayer.
*To communicate Christian perspectives to the attention of Israeli leaders and the Jewish community-at-large.
*To counter Anti-Semitism worldwide and support Israel’s divine God-given right to exist in her God-given land.
NOTE: NOT ONE WORD ABOUT BRINGING PEACE TO PHILISTIA.
Rev. Hauer implies that Christian and Israeli values are welded and melded into Judeo-Christianity. But Israeli values are not Christian, and there is no such thing as a “Judeo-Christian” value. To examine the idiocy of pretending Israel has Christian values, consider abortions in Israel.
It is not only legal to abort by act of its Knesset, but abortion is federalized. The government pays for and operatives perform the killing of the children. Israel has a higher abortion rate than in the opulent USA.
So free and easy is abortion that Israel has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, and the Knesset created a government heath organization that determines who is not charged and who must pay for abortions. Israeli values of death clash with Christ’s value of life.
Israel not only provides abortions for its own citizens, but fences its Arab neighbors into a reservation. They are often denied medical care for difficult childbirths. In contrast to Israel, abortion is all but unknown on the streets of Gaza. I spoke to working men can scarcely believe the story of American abortion mills, and seem unaware of Israel’s policy. One would not think of using the “A” word in the presences of a Philistine lady, so alien is the very thought of it, and the same can be said of US Mosques where I have spoken.
Kay Arthur and Janet Parshall are “pro-life” leaders and claim they oppose abortion, but do they? How can they fawn over the Israeli government that pays for and performs abortions? These American celebrity Christians, including Sheryl Hauer, claim to be joining with Israelis to protect Midwestern and North African women from exploitation, but they ignore the worst exploiters of women, Israel.
Thousands of abortions are performed on female Defense Forces draftees, who at the age of 18-19 are conscripted to serve with men, a very favorable climate for unmarried pregnancy. What greater exploitation of women than to prostitute them to the military?
Kay Arthur and her entourage are self-trained to accept the polished words of the Israeli and ignore its evil acts. She did not create dispensationalism, but she has become a prospering carrier of this disease. She has moved from host to vector, from victim to parasite.
Evangelical celebrities are the strongest and most successful, they seem driven by the most testosterone; their aphrodisiac is power. Zionized-Christians have been schooled and trained to be an alien cult. Each believes his own words because others cling to them as though from God. Hence they will not be changed except by Gods own hand.
It would be our error to end The Bigfish Conspiracy and the Christian-Right, Part Il, without introducing the influence of the Oxford Press on it. Scofield’s movement, about which this author has written so much, is the flimsy intellectual moorings to which Zionized-Christianity is tethered. It is like a boat tied to a floating stump; its falseness is based on error, fed by heresy. Its celebrity leaders, including Kay Arthur, are the product of a concerted effort to warp and control Christianity by changing the bible. We call it “Scofieldism” because of this one man’s terrible contribution.
A Glimmer of Hope
Financially successful celebrities, including those three Women discussed today, are probably lost causes, for each has made a business of Christian-Zionism. In contrast we must seek out the youths caught up in this terrible error, and who have not yet become parasites to it. They can be rescued from it from what amounts to Christian-Pharisaism because they are willing to see the plain and simple truth of Christ.
IN PART III: More enormous errors and the big loud guns, John Hagee, Jerry Falwell, and many more who believe Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophesy. Some say Jews enjoy a separate, very wide, gate into Heaven; most importantly, we document why they believe this spiritually fatal error. Their Achilles heel is the false book they use.
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS
Part I: The Zionized-Christian political reality is Israel first, Jesus second
Read: The Final Apostacy by Gordon Ginn
