Time to Divest from Protestant Churches

The ultimate oxymoron

Take a close look at the picture above and you'll see a good example of why the mainline Protestant churches are on life support throughout the world. The man above holds a sign that proclaims him to be a "Palestinian Methodist" who obviously wants you to believe that Israel treats his people badly.

Imagine if John Wesley, the founder of Methodism came back to the world today and witnessed what Protestant Christianity has become in the 21st Century; trite, hackneyed, compromised, ecumenical and powerless. And imagine what he'd think if he encountered that man holding his sign while standing on the steps of a church that Wesley and his brother Charles founded in the 18th Century. No, John Wesley wouldn't be a happy man.

And whether or not that "Palestinian Methodist" has a valid beef with Israel isn't the issue here. The real issue here is biblical truth which is something that many Protestant churches have been treating over the past several decades like a deadly, infectious disease. For starters, there never existed in all of history an indigenous people called Palestinians. They are in fact a mixture of several tribes and nations that have existed throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East for nearly 4,000 years. 

Secondly, the term "Palestinian" is an adaption from the ancient Philistines who were a maritime people that lived along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. The Philistines weren't a Semitic tribe which means that their ancestors didn't come from Abraham who is considered the patriarch of both Jews and Arabs. That historical fact invalidates any argument that Palestinians offer to proclaim the land of Israel as their ancestral homeland that they allege was stolen from them by the Jews. In fact, before 1948 when Israel was declared a sovereign world nation once again by the United Nations, the term Palestinian was popularly applied to the Jews who lived in the land. No Arab, Bedouin, Turk, Persian, Egyptian, Assyrian etc. wanted anything to do with that designation because before May 15, 1948, a Palestinian was considered just another name for a Jew.

Then how did that land come to be known as Palestine for nearly 2,000 years? In 130 A.D. it was renamed Palestine by Roman Emperor Hadrian who declared the nation of Israel null and void after he had put down the Bar Kochba rebellion that sought Israel's independence from Rome. Hadrian was so angered by the Jewish rebellion that he not only changed the name of the nation, he also defiled the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by constructing a temple to the pagan god Jupiter. 

It was only after Israel became a sovereign nation again in 1948 that the Islamic world sought to invalidate Israel's existence by claiming that the Jewish nation had stolen land that had belonged to the "Palestinians" for over 3,000 years. The Palestinian Liberation Organization was formed specifically with one purpose; to destroy Israel from within her borders by acts of terrorism and from without by an international propaganda campaign that painted the Jews as occupiers who stole the land of an indigenous people called Palestinians and then enslaved them in squalid refugee camps.

Tragically, that propaganda campaign has worked. But only because there are willfully ignorant people throughout the world that refuse to learn history. Like every Protestant denomination, the Methodist Church exists only because of the Jewish people and the Jewish Messiah Jesus Christ. I believe that John Wesley would be ashamed of the Methodist Church if he came back today. Because he knows that without the Jewish people and the nation of Israel, there would be no Jesus Christ and certainly no Methodist Church.

So, it's time for Protestant denominations such as the Methodist Church to either divest from the lies and canards that give credibility to Islamic terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda that seek to murder Jews and destroy Israel. Or, it's time for Christians to divest of their membership in these churches and find better churches that stick with the truth.