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Ever since I received the Messiah as a little boy in the Daughters of Miriam Orphanage, I hungered to reach out to my brethren, the Jews. Even as the rabbi was trying to convince me to renounce this new Gospel I had received, believed and held near to my heart, I was aching to make him understand that Jesus was the Messiah who had been prophesied throughout the Old Testament, the hope of Israel. From that day forward, I harbored a deep spiritual desire to bring Jews to Christ throughout the world. After all, He had come to the Jews first, and offered the Gospel to them first. Only when the Jews had rejected Him and His message did Jesus command that the Gospel be preached to the Gentiles. Through the centuries, many Christian leaders believed and taught that the Jews had missed their chance, that Israel was hopelessly lost and could not be redeemed. That kind of preaching led to all kinds of anti-Semitism and killing. The misinterpretation and hatred reached a boiling point in the early centuries after Jesus’ passion with “Saint” John Chrysostom, who said “It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate the Jews.” The crusades of the Middle Ages were not so much a quest to seize the Holy Land as it was a crusade against Jews everywhere. But by far, the most virulent anti-Semite before Adolph Hitler was Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant reformation. Luther wrote a tract called “On the Jews and their Lies,” in which he spewed forth the most vile filth against God’s chosen people that had been committed to paper nearly in all of history. In this vile tract, Luther demanded that the Jews’ synagogues be burned, their books destroyed, their homes wiped out, their money confiscated, their tongues be cut from their throats and that “young and strong Jews and Jewesses be given the flail, the ax, the hoe, the spade, the distaff and spindle and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses as is enjoined upon Adam’s children… Download and read the rest of this chapter:
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