“The Gift of Jerusalem”

“And it came to pass after these things, that God did test Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, behold here I am.

   And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

   And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and cut wood for the burnt offering, and rose up and went unto the place of which God had told him…

   And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.

   And Isaac spoke unto Abraham, his father, and said, my father: and he said, Behold the fire and the wood:  but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

   And Abraham said, my son, God will provide himself a lamb for the burnt offering:  so they went both of them together…” (Genesis 22:1-8 NKJV)

 Mount Moriah, the place where Abraham offered his son Isaac to God is thought to be the same site in Jerusalem in which Solomon built the holy temple.  From the beginning this site has been sacred to Jews, Moslems and Christians.  It has been called “the holy city” and “the city of peace.”

So today, when we hear persons talking about the final status of Jerusalem, these words are meant to speak to what Jerusalem will mean to all the nations when the question of the Israelis and the Palestinians and their place in Jerusalem is finally decided and the status of the holy sites sacred to Christians, Moslems and Jews so that universal access is preserved for all religions to have unrestricted access to their holy places of worship and prayer.

Donald Trump, President of the United States of America, cast a giant monkey wrench into all the current deliberations going on in every nation on earth by his endorsing West Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish nation.  He said, “I am only acknowledging the reality of what is already true.”  However, he did not at the same time endorse East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state, which was to be part of the solution proposed by Secretary of State James Baker in the 1980s, when the two state solution was first proposed, in which Israel would trade land for recognition by the Arab nations and peace with the Palestinians, who would also be given their own sovereign state.

This announcement by President Trump places the United States in the camp of favoring the Jews over the Palestinians in the peace accords and according to many Palestinians has negated any role the US will ever play from this time on as a mediator in the peace process.  In fact, Vice President Pence was scheduled to meet with the Palestinian Abbas, but has been told not to come.  The lights were also turned off in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus as protest, to symbolize the darkness which has fallen upon the Peace Accords and future planned negotiations on the status of Jerusalem.

President Trump says this is in “the national interest of the United States.”  This statement is hard to justify since this action has galvanized radical Moslems around the globe, some calling for “an intifada against the United States and Israel.”  This action, of course pleases many conservative Christians, as Vice-President Mike Pence, who see this as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy which sees the Jewish nation as ascendant over all nations and all nations streaming in the last days into Jerusalem to worship the Lord Jesus there.  Of course, the passages quoted will often be those from The Revelation of John, which is highly symbolic and indeed reflects those things happening after Jesus returns as Messiah to the earth, and not before.  What the Holy Bible intends as a symbolic recognition of Jerusalem = the church of Jesus Christ uniting all the earth, is instead misinterpreted by literalist to mean the actual city of Jerusalem.  St. Augustine defined the difference between the earthly city and the heavenly Jerusalem in his grand treatise from the 4^th century AD entitled The City of God.   Apparently neither Vice President Pence nor President Trump has taken the time to reflect on the meaning of those words, but instead have now wedded the military power and government of the United States to the secular state of Israel, which is not Christian, but Jewish and has an entirely different agenda from the communion of the saints as proclaimed in the Apostles Creed of the holy catholic church.  This conservative, literalist approach to the holy scriptures is most unfortunate, leading now to all types of gross errors of thinking among many persons, not the least of which is the President of the United States, who supposedly speaks for all citizens of the United States.  This is not true, of course, but how will the voice of “the rest of us” ever be heard?

The consensus statement on Jerusalem from the 1980s essentially proposed not only land for peace, with Israel conceding land for the recognition of Israel’s legitimacy by the Palestinians, but also would have included the dismantling of the illegitimate settlements in Eastern Jerusalem in which Jewish settlers have been in a mad land grab to claim what is not theirs in hopes of obtaining later legitimacy to this area.  However, these settlements have never been recognized by the International community, including the United States.  This is one of the main reasons President Barak Obama was not well liked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as President Obama insisted often to Netanyahu that these settlements should be dismantled, as they were on Palestinian land.  President Obama tried to be fair to the Palestinians and the Jews in the search for peace for both parties, but Netanyahu was encouraging these Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and he chose to ignore the warnings of all persons that his intransigence is the real obstacle to peace.

The best possible outcome for Jerusalem is that it be declared an International City of Peace, so that not only Jews, Christians and Moslems can enter and worship there, but people of all religions and faith, including those of no religions at all.  The city should be an International City of Peace, a place of no weapons of any kind, no guns, knives, or anything destructive of human or animal life.  It should be a city in which crime does not exist, but is a place for worship and prayer.  Anyone who does anything harmful to anyone within this city of refuge should be punished and permanently banned from this holy place.

The only solution which makes any legitimate sense is when “no one wins, all can win.”  Jerusalem, this great city of peace does not below to Jews, Palestinians, Armenians, Moslems or Christians.  Instead, it must belong to everyone on earth!  Every human being of any land, nation, people or creed has a right to visit and to worship in his holy place.  It indeed can be a place which unites all people of the earth, but not in the way envisioned by Donald Trump, Mike Pence or Benjamin Netanyahu.  All citizens of the earth are citizens of Jerusalem.  The land, so torn apart by war and conflicts over many centuries and generations can become a city of refuge, a place which needs no police or armed guards of any kind, but a city called “Jerusalem”, which means, “the city of peace.”

Bill W.

The voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God!”