The Jews, the Church, and Two Ditches to Avoid
What do Gentile Christians actually owe the Jewish people?
Something has gone wrong in how American Christians think about the Jews, and it’s gone wrong in two opposite directions at once.
On the one side, a generation of evangelical Christians have been taught that the Bible requires them to give unqualified support for the nation of Israel, politically, financially, and militarily. They do this because they believe Israel is God’s chosen people. In order to stand with God, you must also stand with Israel. Period. Any criticism of Israel is the same as antisemitism. This view has been so thoroughly absorbed into American evangelical culture that many Christians can’t even tell you where it came from. It’s a theological reflex that they can’t explain or defend biblically, apart from perhaps a couple of proof texts.
On the other side, a growing number of Christians, many of them reacting directly to the first group, have swung hard in the opposite direction. They’ve discovered that the theological case for Christian Zionism is biblically weaker than they were told, and they’ve watched evangelical leaders embarrass themselves by fawning over and pandering to Israeli foreign policy interests. They’ve read things about how much the Jews control media, finance, and pop culture in harmful ways, and they are eager to oppose them for it.
In some cases, this frustration with “the Jews” has driven them to what can only be described as hatred for them en masse. The popular label for this is “antisemitism.” Personally, I don’t like that label because it’s a liberal coded word used to smear anyone who dares criticize Israel at all. Nevertheless, I’ll use it in this article for the sake of simplicity. There really are people out there who hate the Jews and “antisemitism” is a simple way to describe them.
What I find striking is that an overreaction to the first ditch tends to drive people into the second. In other words, when you build a pro-Israel theology on a weak foundation, and then people discover that, they often feel like the wool has been pulled over their eyes. When people feel theologically betrayed, they often run hard in the opposite direction. I think we’re seeing that happening in our day.
How Scripture Addresses the Issue
People on both sides cite scripture to support their views. Ironically, however, scripture rules out both views.
In Romans 9-11, for example, Paul is not writing a foreign policy manual. He is not telling Gentile Christians to write checks to the Israeli government or vote for politicians who promise to defend Israel. He is also not dismissing the Jewish people as just another ethnic group with no particular significance in God’s redemptive purposes. He is doing something more careful and more interesting than either of those things.
Scripture consistently forbids the sin of partiality, whether it be against or in favor of someone. James 2:9 says, “but if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors” (cf 2:1, Rom 2:11).
Christian Zionism is the sin of partiality in favor of the Jews, extending it outward to encompass the entire national entity. In Romans 9, Paul’s anguish over the Jews was not regarding the nation of Israel as we know it today, but of the Jews as his “kinsmen according to the flesh.” He was talking about people who share a common ancestry and religion.
Antisemitism is partiality against the Jews, whether it be towards individual Jews or the nation of Israel. Same principle, opposite posture, also wicked. We must not show contempt for people based on a group they belong to without respect to their individual actions.
In either case, partiality is forbidden. It is a sin.
Ironically, as people begin to realize “Christian Zionism” is an unbiblical position foisted upon them, largely under the influence of dispensational theology, and as they begin to notice instances where Jews truly have done very evil things, they suddenly feel justified ascribing wickedness to Jews as a whole, showing unnecessary contempt for people who don’t deserve such unfair characterization. Thus, as people abandon the Christian Zionism of the dispensationalists, the pendulum swings hard in the other direction and people end up in the ditch of antisemitism, showing partiality against them instead.
A Surprising Biblical Reversal
Another key text is Romans 9-11. To understand that text, you have to feel the weight of the Jew/Gentile reversal that is key to Paul’s argument. It is one of the most stunning plot twists in all of Scripture.
In the Old Testament, God’s people were the Jews who descended from Abraham. The Gentiles were outside the covenant. By definition, they were pagans and unbelievers. Thus, Israel occupied a position of extraordinary blessing and privilege. God gave them the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the law, the worship, and the promises (Rom 9:4). Everything God was doing in redemptive history, he was doing through them.
By the time Paul wrote Romans, the picture had completely flipped. The Jews had largely rejected their Messiah while the Gentiles were more receptive to the gospel. The Jews who rejected their Messiah now found themselves in the position the Gentiles once occupied: outside the covenant, cut off from the promises, and under God’s judgment. It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this. Further, Gentile Christians, who previously would have been considered “dogs” and pagans, had now inherited everything that once belonged to Israel (see Paul’s olive tree illustration in Rom 11:17-24, cf Jer 11:16, Ps 52:8, John 15:2).
You’re Living in a House You Didn’t Build
Now, think about what we Gentile Christians have inherited: the Old Testament scriptures, the covenants, the promises, the law, the worship, and even the very concept of the one true God. Further, we Gentiles can now claim Abraham as our spiritual father, though we are not physically descended from him. Abraham is the father of everyone who believes. He’s now our spiritual great-great-great-grandfather, while his own physical descendants are now considered outsiders to the covenant. Every promise that sustains us as Christians came first to the Jewish people. We are reading their mail, worshiping their God, and claiming their patriarch as our own.
Think of it this way. Imagine you’re away on a long trip, and someone moves into your home, settles in, and invokes squatter’s rights. They’re not just living in your house, they’re claiming your home as their own.
Now, imagine further that they claim the family photos on your wall as their family. They say, “that’s my mom and dad, that’s my wedding, those are my kids” in those pictures. They claim all your vacation memories, the food in the refrigerator, the car in the garage. All of it. That’s what it’s like for Gentile Christians to have inherited the promises of Abraham. We didn’t build this spiritual house, yet we’re living in it.
If that happened to you, you would feel something. Probably a mix of indignation, outrage, and grief. That feeling is what Paul is deliberately trying to provoke in the Jewish people. He wants them to feel the weight of what they lost by rejecting their Messiah. By his reasoning, that sense of jealousy might be what brings some of them back. “Inasmuch as I am an apostle to the Gentiles,” he writes in Rom 11:13, “I magnify my ministry in order somehow to make my fellow Jews jealous, and thus save some of them.” In other words, they can come back home if they simply repent of their sins and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
That’s the dynamic Paul is describing. Now, what is his point to the Gentiles in all this? Paul’s message to Gentile Christians is to not take for granted how incredibly blessed we are to granted in to the cultivated olive tree of God. It’s as thought Paul is telling us, “this isn’t the spiritual house your Gentile ancestors built. They were pagans. You have been invited to live here and claim the promises originally given to the Jewish people because they rejected their Messiah. It’s yours now only because God has graciously given it to you, not because you earned it. Don’t be arrogant about that fact.”
In Romans 11:18, Paul says, “it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you.” The wild olive shoot doesn’t get to look down with arrogance on the cultivated tree.
The Part Where Things Get More Complicated
Now, the biggest challenge is not so much the doctrine presented here, but the application of it in our day. Here’s what I mean.
We should not automatically assume the Jews of our day are exactly the same as the Jews in Paul’s day without serious theological reflection. It matters that we get this right because it’s so easy to see the word “Israel” in our Bibles and assume it means the same thing as the modern nation state led by Bibi Netanyahu. Not so.
Paul’s affection for his kinsmen rested on two foundations. First, Paul had genuine genealogical connection to them. This was his own blood and family. He was from the tribe of Benjamin, and every Jew of his day could trace their tribal ancestry back to Abraham. The careful maintenance of genealogical records was central to Jewish identity because Abraham’s bloodline was theologically significant.
Modern Jewish identity, by contrast, is primarily ethnic and cultural. There are no genealogical records linking contemporary Jewish people to Abraham’s specific line. This doesn’t mean there’s no connection, it just means the connection cannot be verified the way it could in Paul’s day.
Second, and more importantly, Paul could say the Jews of his day had a genuine zeal for God. Romans 10:2 plainly says, “I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.” In other words, they believed in the God of Israel and were seeking righteousness. And for the most part, they rejected Jesus out of ignorance, not contempt. Their zeal was “not according to knowledge.” Jesus said something similar when he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Paul’s grief was the grief of a man watching his devout family members miss the very thing their whole religion pointed toward.
I point this out to highlight the fact that what we know as modern Judaism is quite different from ancient Judaism of the New Testament. By most estimates, 60 to 80% of contemporary Jewish people do not significantly observe Jewish religious practice. For the majority of modern Jews, Jewish identity is not primarily religious, it is more ethnic and cultural. For the most part, modern Jews don’t worship the God of Abraham or follow the Torah at all. Many (if not most) of them are secular atheists who happen to share an ethnic heritage.
Further, modern Jewish identity, as it has developed through Rabbinic Judaism, shaped substantially by the Talmud, is not characterized by an ignorant zeal for God. Rather, they are quite informed about who Jesus is. Modern Talmudic Judaism is primarily characterized by an explicit and informed rejection and contempt for Jesus Christ. The Jews of Paul’s day didn’t know what or who they were rejecting. That doesn’t excuse them, but it is a notable difference between them and the Jews of today. Modern Judaism, as it is codified in the Talmud, knows exactly who Jesus was and regards him with disdain.
Simply put, the religious profile of ancient Jews is very different from modern Jews. Paul wept over the lostness of ancient Jews because they sought after God but didn’t recognize his Son. I doubt Paul would weep over modern, Talmudic Judaism the way he wept over the ignorant zeal of his kinsmen.
That said, none of this means Gentile Christians should be hostile towards the Jews without respect for their individual beliefs or behaviors. I point this out so we can be more careful about which Romans 11 promises we attach to which people.
Avoiding the Two Ditches
So, back to the two ditches, and what it means in our day.
The Christian Zionism ditch assumes Romans 11 requires political support for the Jewish people and the nation of Israel. This view has dominated American evangelicalism for decades, largely through the influence of dispensational theology, and it has made evangelical Christians easy to manipulate.
The modern nation of Israel understands this aspect of evangelical theology very well, and finds it quite useful. It is not a secret that Israel invests significant resources in cultivating evangelical Christian support.
In January 2026, the Washington Spectator reported on an organization called “Show Faith By Works,” backed by the Israeli government (!), that offered evangelical pastors all-expenses-paid trips to Israel to equip them to become “ambassadors for Israel” in their churches and communities. This is not an isolated example. It reflects a broader and well-documented strategy.
The Southern Baptist Convention has also passed resolutions condemning antisemitism repeatedly — in 1873, 1972, 1981, 2003, 2024, and again in 2026. The fact that they keep having to pass them should tell us something. The 2026 resolution denounced conspiracy theories about Jewish control of media and finance, reaffirmed love for the Jewish people, and called for bold gospel witness. All of that is fine as far as it goes. But what no SBC resolution has ever done is ask whether the dispensational theology that dominates the convention, the theology that taught a generation of Southern Baptists that the Jews are God's chosen people and that supporting Israel is a biblical mandate, is itself the unstable foundation that keeps producing the backlash they keep condemning. They keep treating the second ditch without questioning whether the first ditch is what's pushing people into it.
Remember, Romans 11 is not about foreign policy, it simply exhorts Gentile Christians to not be arrogant towards the Jews. It says maintain humility about your position as a wild olive shoot grafted into a tree you did not plant. None of that translates into a requirement to support any particular nation’s foreign policy. The only concrete obligation the book of Romans places on Gentile Christians toward Jewish people is to share the gospel with them, which is the same obligation we have toward every other lost people group (cf Rom 10:14-21).
The antisemitism ditch assumes the Jews are a uniquely wicked people since they rejected and crucified Jesus Christ. As people realize that Christians have been poorly taught a Christian Zionist position, and that this doctrinal position has been exploited to manipulate people into supporting a foreign government even at the expense of our own people, they get radicalized and end up in the antisemitism ditch.
The path from “I was told I had a theological obligation to support Israel” to “the Jews are uniquely destructive and I’m angry about it” is pretty short, and a lot of people are walking it right now. Again, we should not overlook or excuse the sins committed by Jewish people, but it is also unjust to falsely accuse them of sins they didn’t actually commit.
In short, Christians do not owe Israel uncritical political support. We are not obligated to show deference to any particular Israeli government or policy. Whether or not America supports Israel politically should be determined by what is in America’s national interests, not determined by an unbiblical, misguided, and easily-exploited theological doctrine.
As Christians, we should maintain a posture of genuine humility and gratitude, acknowledging that we are the wild olive branch that inherited Jewish blessings, promises, scriptures, and worship. We now claim a Jewish patriarch as our own and are living in a spiritual house we did not build.
Conclusion
God has been doing something in history that few would have anticipated. He used the Jewish people to bring the Messiah into the world. He allowed their rejection of their Messiah to open the door for the Gentile nations to come in, from which he is gathering a people from every tribe and tongue. And he has promised that before it is all over, large numbers of Jewish people will receive their Messiah by faith and be grafted back into their own olive tree.
Our job is not to manage that process through foreign policy. Our job is to simply to proclaim the gospel to everyone, Jews included, and leave the results with the God whose ways are unsearchable and whose gifts and calling are irrevocable.
So, don’t be arrogant toward the branches. Also, don’t let anyone tell you that humility requires you to write them a check.
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