A Love That Has Lost Its Way
There is something genuinely beautiful in the evangelical love for Israel. It is not, at its root, a political posture or an ideological program. It is, or at least it began as, a love born of the Scriptures — a tender, almost aching affection for the people through whom the oracles of God were preserved, through whom the Messiah came, and through whom the world was offered a covenant older than any nation. To love Israel is, in this sense, to love the story of redemption itself. And for that impulse, however misshapen it has become, we ought not to be contemptuous. We ought to be honest.
But honesty requires us to say what tenderness alone cannot: this love has lost its way. It has exchanged the Heavenly Jerusalem for a postal code. It has traded the vocation of praise for the politics of territory. And in doing so, it has not only confused itself — it has done harm to the very people and the very faith it set out to honor.
The Map Is Not the Destination
Christian Zionism, in its dominant evangelical form, is a theology built on maps. It traces the borders of a promised land, counts the returning exiles, watches the headlines from Tel Aviv with prophetic anticipation, and reads the modern state of Israel as the fulfillment of ancient covenantal promise. Its architects — from John Nelson Darby to Hal Lindsey to the countless pastors who have led Holy Land tours with a Bible in one hand and a geopolitical commentary in the other — have convinced millions that to bless Israel is to bless the nation-state, and that to question its policies is to court divine judgment.
What this reading consistently overlooks is the question the prophet Isaiah dared to ask on God's behalf: “Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?” (Isaiah 66:1). The divine dwelling, it turns out, cannot be contained by a border. The true Jerusalem was never merely a city on a hill in the Levant. It was always, in the fullness of its meaning, a direction of the soul — a pilgrimage toward the presence of God that no political settlement can fulfill and no military victory can secure.
What the Name Actually Means
To understand the confusion, we must go back to the names themselves — for the names carry the meaning that centuries of political theology have obscured. The word Yehudi, translated into English as “Jew,” does not originate in ethnicity or geography. It originates in praise. When Leah bore her fourth son, she cried out: "This time I will praise the Lord" — and she named the child Yehudah, Judah. The name contains within it the very Tetragrammaton, the holy and ineffable name of God. To be a Yehudi, then, is not primarily to belong to a race or inhabit a land. It is to be a person of praise — one whose very identity is oriented toward thanksgiving before the living God.
Likewise, the name Israel — given to Jacob after his night of wrestling at the Jabbok — speaks not of territory but of encounter: one who has striven with God and prevailed, who has been wounded and blessed in the same moment. Israel is a name for pilgrims, not settlers. It is a name for those who are still on the way, still wrestling, still limping toward the dawn. To flatten this name onto a modern nation-state is not to honor it. It is to misread it entirely.
The Conditional Embrace
Here is one of the more painful ironies of Christian Zionism: its love for the Jewish people is, at its theological core, instrumental. Jews are needed to fulfill a script. The ingathering, the temple, the tribulation, the return of Christ — all of this requires Jewish actors in a Jewish homeland, performing roles assigned by a dispensationalist drama conceived largely in nineteenth-century Britain. When the final act arrives, in most versions of this eschatology, the Jewish people who have not accepted Jesus will face catastrophic judgment. The love, in other words, is real — but it is a love with an agenda. And a love with an agenda is something less than love.
Authentic Jewish voices have noted this for decades. The embrace of Christian Zionism from certain corners of Israeli politics is a marriage of convenience, not covenant. The Christian arrives bearing political support and tourist dollars; the Israeli accepts both without accepting the theology. Neither side is quite honest about what the other believes. And in this mutual performance, genuine dialogue — the kind that might actually lead somewhere — is quietly foreclosed.
The Harm We Must Name
The theological harm runs deeper than confused eschatology. When a political state is sacralized — when its existence and actions are framed as the unfolding of divine promise — the ordinary moral categories that Christians bring to the evaluation of nations are suspended. Displacement becomes providence. Occupation becomes fulfillment. Critique becomes apostasy. This is not a posture that honors the prophets. It is, in fact, exactly the posture the prophets spent their lives opposing — the assumption that divine election immunizes a people or a state from moral accountability.
The harm comes also to the church itself. A Christianity captivated by geopolitical prophecy is a Christianity that has substituted a newspaper for the Sermon on the Mount. It produces believers who are fluent in the vocabulary of end-times speculation and largely silent on the demands of justice, mercy, and covenant faithfulness that run from Sinai to the Sermon on the Mount to the book of Revelation. It replaces the hard, daily work of becoming a people of praise with the easier excitement of watching prophecy unfold on cable news.
The True Destination
What, then, is the alternative? Not indifference to the Jewish people. Not the cold supersessionism that has done its own terrible damage across centuries of church history. Not the pretense that the land and the people and the covenants carry no meaning. Rather, the alternative is to recover the deeper meaning that was always there, waiting beneath the political noise.
The true destination of the people of God — Ezrah and Ger alike, Jew and those grafted in from the nations — is the Heavenly Jerusalem. This is not a pious abstraction. It is the most concrete thing in Scripture. The writer to the Hebrews calls it the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. John sees it descending like a bride. Isaiah asks where God's true house will be built — and the answer is not on any earthly hilltop but in the gathered, redeemed, praising community of those who have striven with God and walked, limping and blessed, toward the dawn.
To pray for the peace of Jerusalem is a holy calling. But we must know what we are praying for. We are not praying for the military security of a state, nor for the success of a political project, however sincere the people involved. We are praying for the coming of the city that God is building — the Jerusalem where the name of every inhabitant is, in the deepest sense, Yehudi: one who praises. We are praying, in other words, for ourselves, and for all who will join us on the way.
A Call to Honest Love
The evangelical love for Israel need not be abandoned. It needs to be purified — returned to its source in covenant and praise, freed from the distortions of dispensationalist prophecy and political entanglement. An honest love for the Jewish people will sit with them in their complexity, honor the Orthodox voices that have long resisted the equation of Torah with territory, learn from the tradition that has kept the Sabbath and the oracles through centuries of exile, and refuse to reduce a living people to props in someone else's eschatological screenplay.
And an honest love for Jerusalem — the real Jerusalem, the one whose peace we are called to seek — will keep its eyes lifted toward the city that is coming, even as it walks faithfully through the city that is. For we are all, in the end, pilgrims. We are all still wrestling. We are all still limping toward the dawn, bearing the wound and the blessing together, on our way to the only destination that will hold us all.
— Baruch HaShem
