Ideas Have Consequences

Why Are the Jews So Hated? | Darrow Miller

• Disciple Nations Alliance • Season 2 • Episode 78

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Episode Summary: Antisemitism is surging at an alarming rate around the world—but what’s fueling this ancient hatred? In this episode, Darrow Miller joins us to explore the deeper spiritual realities driving antisemitism—realities the media, politicians, and even most churches won’t touch. This conversation isn't just about politics, land disputes, ancient grievances, or theological camps. 

At its core, antisemitism is a rejection of the moral universe revealed by the God of the Bible. When God called Abraham, He didn’t just form an ethnic group—He launched a revolutionary worldview with one sovereign Creator, one moral law, and one standard of truth. This vision of reality has, and will, always provoke hostility in a world that longs for autonomy.

Jews, whether religious or secular, represent this divine worldview by their very existence. They are living reminders that there is a God—and that we are not Him! This is why totalitarian regimes, pagan cultures, and secular movements have always sought to erase them.

Join us as we trace the spiritual and historical roots of antisemitism, from Egypt to Auschwitz to today’s college campuses. Examine how the same hatred directed at Jews eventually targets Christians who uphold biblical morality. The urgent question is: Will Christians stand in solidarity with the Jewish people—or remain silent as this civilizational crisis deepens?


Who is Disciple Nations Alliance (DNA)? Since 1997, DNA’s mission has been to equip followers of Jesus around the globe with a biblical worldview, empowering them to build flourishing families, communities, and nations. 👉 https://disciplenations.org/


Featured Guest: Darrow Miller is a world-renowned author and teacher on Christianity and culture, apologetics, worldview, poverty, and the dignity of women. In 1981, he began 27 years at Food for the Hungry, serving there as vice president from 1994 to 2007 until he helped launch the DNA in 2008. 


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Scott D. Allen:

The hatred, the anti-Semitism is rooted in the fact that in a fallen world, people hate God and they don't want to live under God. They want to be gods themselves.

Darrow Miller:

And it's kind of as simple as that it associates you with the living God, with a biblical worldview, with the concept of a moral universe. If you do not want those things— and a fallen world does not. Yeah, you have to get rid of God and you have to get rid of the Jews, but it's not just the Jews, because eventually it'll be to get rid of Christians.

Scott D. Allen:

And when Hitler went after the Jews and rounded them up, he didn't care whether they were pagan Jews who didn't believe or not. They were just.

Luke Allen:

Jews. It's a guilty by association. The Jews, even if they don't like God, if they've rejected God, if they hate God and if they've totally turned away from him, they're still wearing the jersey that says God on it.

Scott D. Allen:

Welcome again, everybody, to another episode of Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance. I'm Scott Allen, I'm the president here at the DNA and I'm joined today by team members Dwight Vogt, luke Allen and team member Darrell Miller, who's also kind of functioning as our special guest today. Darrell, it's great also kind of functioning as our special guest today, darrell, it's great to have you back on Ideas have Consequences.

Darrow Miller:

It's great to be back on. I really miss my time with you guys in this and maybe someday I'll be able to be back on a regular basis.

Scott D. Allen:

But thank you for inviting me today on a regular basis, but thank you for inviting me today. Yeah, darrell's been struggling with some health issues and has been in recovery. He's doing better, but we're glad that you're back, darrell. I know it's been kind of a long journey, so it's great, as I said, great to have you back and we do pray for your complete recovery as well, so. I invite all of our listeners to pray for you, Darrell.

Darrow Miller:

Thank you.

Scott D. Allen:

We're going to talk today about a series of blogs, darrell, that you wrote some weeks ago. The title of the blogs were Getting to the Root of Antisemitism. They're excellent. Our listeners can find these blogs at Darrow's blog site, darrow Miller and Friends. Just go ahead and put that into your search bar, darrow Miller and Friends and it'll pull right up and then you can search that blog site for the Getting to the Roots of Anti-Semitism. It's a four-part blog series. We're going to be focusing primarily on the first in that series.

Scott D. Allen:

The title of that blog is what we just mentioned Getting to the Root of Antisemitism, dara. I thought it was excellent and really profound insights. It's a really important topic right now, as we're recording this episode. It's the same week we're days away from Israel having launched air raids on, dramatic air raids on Iran, and of course, that comes in response to years and years of Iranian threats to abolish, to annihilate Israel, to wipe them off the face of the earth, and they're building up of their nuclear arsenal. And so right away, you know we're in the headlines. Yet are you know this anti-Semitism, this hatred of the Jews and this desire to see them annihilated? That's just one example. Of course, daryl, you begin this blog by talking about how we're seeing a rise in anti-Semitism. Talk a little bit about that. What were you seeing in particular? You could be as broad or narrow with that as you want.

Darrow Miller:

Well, let me give you a little bit of my background to help frame that. My wife and I had the privilege of studying in Israel right out of college for five months at the Institute for Holy Land Studies and we fell in love with Israel. One of our best friends there was a Jewish woman who lost her entire family in the Nazi death camps. She was the only survivor and the other was the gardener at the school, who was a dear friend named Boutros Ghali. He was Palestinian. So we had a dear Jewish woman and a dear Palestinian friend. So that's part of our background.

Darrow Miller:

I've spent a lot of time reading about the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust and how people were slow to react and in how Christians supported Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s in Germany. And a question I've had how could that be? And then I've read a number of books on the Warsaw Ghetto, where there were half a million Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War two and the Nazis came in in a six month I think was a six month period of time, killed 450,000 of the half a million Jews in six months and there were 50,000 left, most of them young people, and they said we're going to die? Are we going to go as lambs to the slaughter or are we going to fight? And the story of the Warsaw Ghetto, what the Nazis did there and these young Jewish people standing against the Third Reich, is a remarkable story. And it was that, the events of the Warsaw Ghetto, that birthed the spirit that led to the foundation of Israel. So those are things I've been studying for years.

Darrow Miller:

It's part of my background and you know, when you talk to me today, it's going to be coming from that background.

Scott D. Allen:

So, yeah, thanks for sharing that background. You're you know your own personal story and your interest on this subject. Uh, let's come back to you know, anti-semitism and, by the way, for the for the sake of this discussion, I know when you begin a discussion on something like anti-semitism or just jews in general, it can become confusing. And I I just want to say kind of what we're for the sake of our conversation today, when we speak about Jews, we're talking about people who are direct, you know, trace a direct descendancy or lineage ethnically to Abraham, isaac and Jacob or Israel.

Luke Allen:

Yeah.

Scott D. Allen:

Now again it's. I understand, there's nuances there, you know you have.

Darrow Miller:

Ethiopians who are.

Scott D. Allen:

Jews who are ethnically Ethiopian. But I think, for the sake of our discussion on anti-Semitism, I think we can just kind of focus in on people that are ethnically Jewish, whether they're Christian or not, but they trace their blood lineage back to that group, that tribe, if you will, the tribe of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, that group, that tribe, if you will, the tribe of Abraham Isaac and Jacob. So, darrell, you wrote about how alarmed you are at this rise in anti-Semitism. Talk a little bit about that. What are you seeing? What's alarming you as we look right now at this current situation that we're in?

Darrow Miller:

We are seeing anti-Semitism in the United States and globally that parallels the anti-Semitism that we saw in Germany in the lead up to World War II. In the lead up to World War II, and if you study the history of the Jews, virtually throughout history, there have been programs against the Jews and anti-Semitism rising its evil head in country after country where the Jews have been persecuted, where they've been driven from their home country, where they've been murdered. And Nazi Germany was the high point. I think Nazi Germany was the high point, I think, where Hitler's goal was to eliminate all the Jews in the world and at the time he succeeded in eliminating about half of the Jews in the world in four years. That is horrendous.

Darrow Miller:

And today we look on the television screens. We see young Europeans, young Americans, blocking streets, blocking bridges, standing in front of universities, saying from the river to the sea. I think most of them have no idea what they're saying. They don't know what river, they don't know what sea, they don't know what they're saying, but what they are saying is there should be no Jews from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Darrow Miller:

And the people that are funding this movement, the people that are behind this movement, that are organizing the movement. They understand perfectly well that they want to get rid of all the Jews in Israel. And you look at universities around the country, you look at young people even young Christians are saying from the river to the sea and they have very little understanding of what they're saying, very little understanding of history and of the anti-Semitism that we see in the world today. Let me simply say that the Jews and Christians have more in common, especially the Jews of the book and Christians of the book have more in common than they do with the secular world and they do with jihadists.

Scott D. Allen:

Yeah, I want to get to that, daryl for sure. Just quoting from your blog. You cite at the beginning of it a couple of headlines from recent newspaper articles. One says anti-Semitism in the United States is at an all-time high. As American Jews report quote explosions of hate. A total of 10,000 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in the US since October 7th. The attack in Israel from Gaza the highest number of incidents in the history of the Anti-Defamation League's recording of such things.

Luke Allen:

Yes, yeah, ironically, this, yeah, that number is a lot higher now In the Anti-Defamation League that was formed after World War II, so I believe this is the highest we've seen in US history since World War II.

Darrow Miller:

Those were from a year and a half ago.

Luke Allen:

those figures, Right, yeah, it's a lot higher now. It hasn't slowed. It hasn't slowed, if anything, don't you think?

Scott D. Allen:

it's continued to grow, right, I mean it's growing.

Darrow Miller:

It's a growing movement in the United States and it's a growing movement globally.

Dwight Vogt:

Yeah that's right, that's right. Can we clarify too anti-Semitism at this point in time it seems to be the movement that we see visibly on the television screen with demonstrations and marches is against Israel, the state of Israel and its supposed colonial posture towards Islam and the region or the Palestinians. But it's actually deeper than that. Could you talk about that, daryl? I mean, most people think anti-Semitism oh, you're talking about Israel and it's a conflict with the Palestinians.

Darrow Miller:

I'm talking about the nation of Israel, the nation state yeah, it's more than now the nation of israel is the only jewish state in the world, and yet that jewish state has about 120 different ethnic groups in it. There are Arab Israelis. 20% of the population of Israel are Arabs and they are in the government, they're in the Knesset, they're in the IDF. Pardon In the IDF.

Darrow Miller:

Yeah they're in the IDF, they fight, they are Israeli citizens. Israel is not simply. It's a Jewish state, on one hand, and it's not Jewish on another, in that there are ethnic groups from all over the world, and so people look today oh, the Jews, israel's only Jewish people? No, the Jews, israel's only Jewish people, no, and we want to get the Jews out of their homeland, from the river to the sea, not realizing that what is Israel? Israel is more ethnically diverse, I think, than any nation in the world except the United States.

Scott D. Allen:

Yeah, and I think, darrell, you're seeing at least I'm seeing anti-Semitism. I mean, again, as Dwight was saying, some of it is, at least verbally, directed at the nation and the policies of Israel, but that doesn't explain why you have people shooting Jewish people in cold blood in Washington DC that have nothing to do with the nation of Israel or the policies of Israel. It seems like there's just again deeper hatred of Jews, you know. Forget the nation state, you know, for a second, because that there's.

Scott D. Allen:

there is something deeper right um yeah, you know, and I think we're seeing. I don't know, darryl, if you have you seen this too? I've noticed.

Darrow Miller:

Oh, go ahead yeah if you want me to take off on what you just said I'm happy.

Darrow Miller:

Yeah, go ahead, yeah yeah, um, the Jews are God's chosen people. He picked them out of all nations to be his people. And where were they when they were his people? They were the Hebrew people in Egypt. They were the poorest of the poor and they were enslaved. They were enslaved for 430 years. They were enslaved. They were enslaved for 430 years. They were slaves, and they weren't just physically enslaved, they had a slave mentality. And God brought them out of Egypt to build a nation, the nation of Israel. And it was one thing to bring them out of Egypt, out of physical slavery, but the more difficult thing was to get the slavery out of their mind. They were mentally enslaved. And so you find the books of Moses, the Pentateuch. This is God's dealing with a slave people to bring them out of slavery and bring slavery out of their mind to make them a free people. So you have God choosing the least of people, a slave people, with the idea of making this a nation that will bless the nations, a nation that will not have a slave mentality but a free mentality. And that's essentially what the first five books of the Bible are about, and, as Christians, we own those are about, and, as Christians, we own those. So it's something that you know we are connected to the Jews at that point and I think one of the key factors and this is what you were hinting at the root of anti-Semitism.

Darrow Miller:

Before God spoke to Abraham, the world was largely pagan. There was not the concept of a creator God who is the creator of the whole, the unifier of the diversity of the universe. There were many small gods, family gods, tribal gods, polytheism. This was the culture of virtually every place in the world and when God spoke to Abraham, he was living in an animistic, polytheistic culture, and that's how he thought. And God spoke out of the heavens and called Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldees, but not just to leave a physical place, but to leave a culture behind and, as it were, birth a new culture, a culture based on the reality that there's one God in the universe and not thousands of little gods, one God who is the creator of all, the unifier of all, and that this God is a moral God and he created a moral universe and he gave to Moses the Ten Commandments. This is a moral code reflecting God's moral nature.

Scott D. Allen:

Yeah, I mean just to reiterate what you're saying, darrell. If I could put it in my own words, you're right at the fall back in Genesis, chapter 3, you know, that's where idolatry was introduced. Right People in their rebellious hearts, you know, rejected the one true God, the Creator God, and worshipped creation and all sorts of false gods. That's the pagan world that you're speaking about. It's the fallen world.

Darrow Miller:

They created these false gods Right.

Scott D. Allen:

Yes. And then, you know, god, in his redemptive plan of history, begins to kind of say I'm going to do something new. And he calls, as you said, Abraham out of that pagan world—he was one of them—out of that and said I'm going to covenant with you, I'm going to create a nation out of you and you are going to worship the one true God, as I always intended, back at Genesis 1 and 2 in the Garden of Eden. And so that's what I hear you saying. This is really what it means. You know, this is the roots of all of this right, because there's a war, isn't there, between this fallen pagan idolatrous world and the worship of the one true and living God. Right, that's right.

Darrow Miller:

It's a war that begins in the heavenlies between God and the angels and the demonic that's at war against God. So it begins in the heavenlies and it moves from a spiritual war in the heavenlies to earth, to earth. And this war is being played out today, as you said, scott, between those who stand before the one true God, the creator of the universe, the savior of the world, and all those who reject him and idolize nature and idolize human beings, idolize science, idolize material things, and there's a conflict going on there.

Scott D. Allen:

I just think that's so. It's so fundamental and so basic and I think it gets lost in a lot of our discussions today.

Darrow Miller:

It does, but I just want to.

Scott D. Allen:

I want to come back to it again, darrell. You wrote in the blog. You said why are the Jews so hated? In short, they are hated because of their ideas and worldview. Ancient paganism was first subverted by Abraham's family. I just think that's really well said. You know, ancient paganism, this demonic, fallen world, idolatrous paganism, was first subverted by Abraham and his offspring because they introduced a new idea into this world, a true idea that there isn't. There is one true God and he's the Lord over all and he's a holy and a moral God that's revealed himself through the Ten Commandments you later wrote too. You wrote this is from Gene Edward Vieth. His thesis fascists hated the Jews not merely because of their race, but because of their ideas and their worldview. Again, mainly we're speaking about their ideas about the one true God. They sought to exterminate the Jews. They also sought to exterminate the Jewish influence, the Jewish idea. That's what's really at the root, darrell. Go ahead and just expand on that.

Darrow Miller:

Well, and their first goal was to eliminate the Jews and their second goal was then to eliminate Christians. Why? Because Christians represent the one true God, the moral God. So they weren't going to start simply with the Jews. They were starting with the Jews and wanted to finally get rid of the Christians in the world with the Jews and wanted to finally get rid of the Christians in the world. Adolf Hitler himself and I think I quote this in one of the blogs he said the reason he was fighting was to get rid of the people who brought the moral God of the desert to the world. He brought the moral God. They brought the moral God of the desert to the world and ruined our ability to do whatever we wanted without guilt.

Scott D. Allen:

There you go, ruined our ability to live as we want. Apart from God. That's the heart of the fallen world Of us all, yeah. That's right. That's the rebellious heart. It's the demonic rebellious heart of the fallen world on the lips of Adolf Hitler, right there, right.

Luke Allen:

That's right. Yeah, this is kind of a side question, but I've always been curious of this and since you've studied this a lot more than me, I thought I'd ask. So Hitler, yeah, and Mein Kampf I think it was the first time he brought that up. The God of the desert is is my ultimate aim here. Um, why did he start with the Jews and not the Christians, though? I just, I just don't get that, because the Jews existed before the Christians.

Darrow Miller:

The Jews were the people of the book. The Jews were the people that brought the concept of one creator God, a moral God who creates a moral universe, to the world. And, as you were saying a minute ago, scott began with abraham as it. I mean, it began with moses and the decalogue, but in the unfolding of this with the nations, it began with abraham and it began with a person in a family and he had to deal with this in himself, with this in himself, because he was an animist yeah, his dad was a.

Scott D. Allen:

He made idols, literally carved them for a living, as I understand.

Darrow Miller:

Yeah, so you have this. This is his culture, this is the way he thinks. And now he hears this voice out of the universe, this huge voice calling him and saying you need to leave this place. And Abraham says well, where are you going to take me? I'll show you. And this had to begin as a new birth, as it were, in Abraham's life, of recognizing there is the one creator, god, and not the local idols and deities that I can make with my hands and worship. I am not in the control of the universe. I am not. I might make these little deities, but God is in control of the universe.

Dwight Vogt:

He is sovereign over all but God is in control of the universe.

Darrow Miller:

He is sovereign over all, and that had to be birthed in Abraham's life before he would listen to the voice and leave.

Dwight Vogt:

And it's interesting that God knew that, just birthing that idea in Abraham and Abraham having descendants, one of whom would be Moses, and eventually he'd give the. Ten Commandments and all of the Bible would be unveiled of who God is through the Jews. But he realized he would need to. He was creating a culture and to create a culture.

Dwight Vogt:

He needed to create a place for that Abraham's descendants to live in unity together, and so he needed a land, he needed a nation. And so he needed a land, he needed a nation. And it's interesting that it didn't just say oh, abraham, you're going to be the light of the world and you're going to be salt and light for everybody. No, you, you will your descendants, and they needed to have a space, a place, a spot, because that's how you create a culture that spot is in the Middle East, which at the time was the crossroads of the world.

Darrow Miller:

If you wanted to go from Africa to Europe, you went through the Middle East. If you wanted to go from Europe to Asia, you'd go through the Middle East.

Dwight Vogt:

It was the crossroads of the world, and it would be a culture that would influence the world.

Darrow Miller:

That's right. That was the promise to Abraham I will make you a great nation and you will bless the nations, and it needed a land, a place, and that was the land that God gave them.

Dwight Vogt:

And culture is birthed in worldview.

Darrow Miller:

And culture is birthed in worldview, or the way you hear me say it all the time culture is birthed in worship. Culture is derived from the word cult, and cult is the word for worship, so we create cultures like the gods that we worship. So so if you worship a tribal deity, your culture is a tribal culture. If you worship a god that is capricious, then you create a culture that is corrupt. If you worship the living God, who is just, then you create a culture of justice. So we make our own gods, except for the God who made us, and then we create cultures like these idols that we make. And Abraham was to break that in himself. He was to break it in leaving his pagan, animistic culture of Ur, of the Chaldees, and move into a land that God would show him, to a land that God would show him, and be the father of the Jewish people who were made to bless the nations. And we could talk today how are the Jews blessing the nations today? That would be a whole discussion we could have.

Dwight Vogt:

So you're saying that anti-Semitism is growing in the world and it's deep and it's rooted in history. It's been here forever, through the pogroms before World War II, and I even.

Darrow Miller:

Yeah, yeah.

Dwight Vogt:

And it's ultimately rooted in the fact that the Jews gave us God of the Bible.

Darrow Miller:

God revealed himself to the world through the Jewish people.

Dwight Vogt:

And.

Scott D. Allen:

I think it's.

Dwight Vogt:

And so we don't want God, so we're anti-Semites, it's more than that, though, dwight.

Scott D. Allen:

It's not just God, it's the culture that is formed from the worship of the living God, and that affects everything. It affects marriage, right? So we're no longer living with 20 wives or just having sex randomly. Now We've got to do things differently than we would have otherwise. So it's God, the worship of the God, and the culture that comes from that, right. I mean, that's what we're talking about.

Dwight Vogt:

So it's the worldview.

Scott D. Allen:

It's the worldview.

Darrow Miller:

It's the worldview, one God, and he, this God, is a moral God and created a moral universe. If you look at Romans 1, where Paul describes how God is angry with human beings because he's revealed himself to them through creation and they have rejected him. And when they reject him, what do they do? They create images like human beings, like man, and images like creatures. They become idolaters. And then what happens? You move from pagan ideology to pagan sexuality and you see what comes following this in Romans 1 is a whole description of pagan sexuality and pagan license. It's a whole list of licenses where you just follow your own instincts. So go ahead.

Luke Allen:

Two, I totally agree with everything you're saying here. But two quick questions, if we could, before we go too much further in the conversation. One could we simply just define anti-Semitism?

Darrow Miller:

And then question two is if it's a hatred of the Jews, that's it.

Scott D. Allen:

That's simple. It's a hatred of the Jews. That's it.

Darrow Miller:

It's simple.

Scott D. Allen:

And why?

Darrow Miller:

do you hate the Jews Because they are the—ultimately, there's all sorts of other things, books, written about it, but why? Because of the worldview of the Jews and the moral universe revealed in the Decalogue moral universe revealed in the Decalogue.

Scott D. Allen:

In other words, they represent the worship of the one true God. That is intolerable in a fallen pagan world.

Luke Allen:

Then why have Christians persecuted Jews throughout history as well?

Darrow Miller:

Because they have been captured by their culture, been captured by their culture. The German Jews were captured by their culture. It was a sacred-secular divide and this is what's governing the church today. We can go into this. This is one of the reasons we're having this podcast is because the church today is governed by a sacred-secular divide and the church in Germany had this sacred-secular divide. God, you know, that's my religion. My politics is over here. It's not a holistic worldview, it's a divided worldview. So, religiously, I'm a Christian, but as a citizen of Germany, I'm following Hitler, and Hitler wanted to extinguish the Jews, and we're doing that today in the church. We are a church that's got our heads in the sand. We should be supporting the Jews and standing against anti-Semitism, but we're not. I don't know if that gets to your question, luke, but I want to go back to where we were a few minutes ago, if that gets to your question.

Luke Allen:

Yeah, let me think about that more. You can get back to your last point.

Darrow Miller:

Okay. The last point was God is a moral God. He made a moral universe. He gave us the Decalogue as a statement that humans could understand it. Based on his moral character, he made us to form families. This is in Genesis 1. Have children. And those children, those families, were made to steward creation. That's Genesis 1, genesis 2. We were made not to be individuals but to form families. That doesn't mean we're not individuals, but if God made us never to form families, just to be individuals, there wouldn't be any more people on the earth. If he'd made two men, there wouldn't be any more people on the earth. Or if he made two women, there wouldn't be any more people on the earth. He made us male and female because that fully reflects his character and his intention was to form families that would populate the earth, that would steward the earth, they would govern what god had made. So that's why we're, that's why we are here and we were made to live within a moral framework before the face of God.

Darrow Miller:

Dennis Prager wrote a profound article that I think I refer to in this series of blogs and if not, I've written a separate blog about it, but the title of the article was something like Jewish Sexuality is Deviant. And I thought what? What? No, jewish sexuality isn't deviant, it's moral, it's made for the framework of marriage. Sex is sacred, it's a beautiful thing. We were made to have sex and he's calling it deviant. So I read the article and what he was saying is pagan sexuality is normal. Jewish sexuality was deviant from the normal and man, that just blew my mind away.

Scott D. Allen:

But that gets the point of the. You know, it's not. It's the worship of the true and living god and a culture that comes from that, including a culture of sexuality and marriage and family formation and everything that goes everything is related which is pretty much everything exactly everything and if and if I could come back to, I want to quote from Exodus 19.

Scott D. Allen:

I just think it's really important. It's one of these key, kind of pivot verses in the Bible. It's where God appears to Moses on Mount Sinai, Starting in verse 3,. Moses went up to God and the Lord called to him from the mountain and said this is what you are to say to the descendants of Jacob and what you are to tell the people of Israel. You yourselves have seen what I did in Egypt, how I carried you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself.

Scott D. Allen:

Now, verse 5, if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all the nations, you will be my treasured possession, Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words you were to speak to the Israelites, and I just bring that up because I just want to remind us all here that God's redemptive plan was to work through the descendants of Israel, but it was for the whole world. As God says here, the whole world is mine and I'm going to give you an assignment to show the world, to show the watching world, what it looks like to worship the one true God and how good that culture, how flourishing and good that culture is that comes from that worship. I think that's what it means to be a kingdom of priests, right To kind of reveal, to show the truth to the watching world. And again, I think this is important because it's not like God chose the Jews and said I love you, you're my treasured possession and I hate the rest of the world.

Scott D. Allen:

No, it was. This is my redemptive plan. I'm going to choose you, I'm going to create a culture through you and it's for the good of the whole world. And that applies equally to the church. Right, we are saved, we're God's people, not for ourselves or our own blessings or benefit, but for the good of the whole world, to create nations that show what it looks like to worship the true and living God, families and nations. So I just want to underscore that as well.

Darrow Miller:

Well, in both cases, scott the Jews and the Christians the focus is outwards. Exactly, god blessed the Jews because he wanted them to be a blessing to the nations. They're not the reservoirs of blessing, they are the channels of blessing, and when they were good and wise, they understood that. And when they turned away from God, they focused on self. Why did Christ raise up the church? Not for itself. He raised up the church for the nations, very similar to the reason he rose up the jews. He rose up, he birthed the church to do moment that, what I said a moment ago.

Darrow Miller:

The jews put the genie of sex into a bottle, the bottle of marriage. That sex is a good thing, it's a wonderful thing, but it's made God design sex for a covenanted couple, for marriage. And Prager goes on to say it is this fact that allowed for the development of Western civilization, western civilization putting the genie of sexuality back into its proper place. And it was a moral code and the dignity of women, men and women coming together, forming families, this whole biblical concept is what created Western civilization.

Scott D. Allen:

Let's dwell on that because I think it's a good illustration too, darrell. I mean so yeah, god says I created sex. I created marriage for a purpose right To bless the nations, to raise up children, to have children protected and nurtured and raised so that they themselves would go and bless the nations and develop the world, steward the world, and then do the same reproduce and continue to do that process.

Scott D. Allen:

It's good. God's intentions are always good. The worship of the true and living God leads to good outcomes, positive flourishing. I mean, this is God's heart. And this sexual ethic and this marriage ethic, it's good for women, right? They're no longer just preyed upon by any man that happens to come along because they're in a marriage. They're protected. It's good for the children because they're raised and protected by the mother and father that gave them birth and educated and raised. So it was civilizational creating, as you say, darrell, but in a fallen world, in a world that hates God, this isn't considered to be good news. This is bad news because, yeah, it impinges upon my autonomy, my freedom.

Darrow Miller:

I don't like it my license. Freedom is different than license.

Scott D. Allen:

It impinges upon my license to do whatever I feel like doing and this gets back to anti-Semitism or anti-Christian views right, because we should be both representing the worship of the true and living God and creating that kind of culture that actually isn't going to be seen as good news in a deeply fallen world. That's right. And so I do think there's this rise of anti-Semitism in the United States. I think Darrow can be tied or linked pretty strongly to the rise of sexual libertinism, lgbtq and the strong hatred of the.

Scott D. Allen:

Christian sexual ethic. The strong hatred in that community, you know, you see it in places like Jack Phillips, we're going to come after you and we're going to make you you know we're going to make force you to deny your Christian sexual ethic and affirm ours. There's a hatred behind that.

Darrow Miller:

It's a denial of a moral universe. It's a denial of an objective reality. There's no objective reality. You can be whatever you want yourself to be and you could be born quote identified as a male and want to be a female and you are a female and the whole culture is being sucked into that pagan concept. We need to call it pagan between worshiping the one and only true God, who is moral and creates a moral framework for us to live in, and the pagan gods that are created because you don't want to worship the living God that allow you to have license to live however you want, without responsibility.

Scott D. Allen:

I just think it is. What I loved about your article, Darrell, is you brought me back to the simplicity of this. The hatred, the anti-Semitism is rooted in the fact that, in a fallen world, people hate God and they don't want to live under God. They want to be gods themselves.

Darrow Miller:

And it's kind of as simple as that.

Scott D. Allen:

It's not about you know. I think earlier on, when we had a podcast on this, I was going into how a lot of the anti-Semitism in the United States right now is rooted in neo-Marxism. And it's true, right, you know, they see Israel, the nation of Israel as colonizers and they see the Palestinians as innocent victims.

Scott D. Allen:

There is that, but it's not the deep root that we're getting at here it's not the deep root Right and that's why I loved your article, because it brought us back to this simple, deep root and it cuts to. It cuts through a lot of this discussion that's happening right now in the church in the United States. I think about Jews and covenant, and are the Jews still relevant and how should we view the Jews? And those are. They can be important questions. I'm not saying hey, don't ask those questions.

Darrow Miller:

But they're not the deep questions.

Scott D. Allen:

It's ignoring this deeper thing that's going on. The Jews represent the worship of the true and living God. Whether they do or not, that's what they. Again, there's secular Jews who don't worship the true and living God, but just being Jewish in this fallen world associates you with the true and living God, and that makes you a target for hatred.

Darrow Miller:

That's right. It associates you with the living God, with a biblical worldview, with the concept of a moral universe. If you do not want those things— and a fallen world does not. Yeah, you have to get rid of God and you have to get rid of the Jews, but it's not just the. Jews, because eventually it'll be to get rid of Christians.

Scott D. Allen:

And this is what links us. You could talk a lot about what are the connections and differences and similarities between Jews and Christians, but in a simple way we could say, one simple, clear linkage is we are both people of the book.

Scott D. Allen:

We are both people that worship the true and living God, and that's going to target us both for hatred, I think. You know, usually it does happen. Like you say, darrell. I mean Niemöller, right in Nazi Germany, the Christian, the great Christian, frankly. But you know, he said they came first for the Jews and then they came for the Christians and I didn't do my best to speak up for the Jews. And now they're coming for me, right, and there's no one to speak up.

Darrow Miller:

And this is where the church today should be speaking up against anti-Semitism and for Jewish people. We should be the advocates of Jewish people. We should be the defenders of Jewish people A lot of that today, darrell.

Scott D. Allen:

a lot of Christians are excited about Israel now being back in its homeland. Following World War II, the Zionism, the establishment of the nation state of Israel as a sign of the end time. So it's kind of driven by that end times eschatology. But you're saying something that's even again more fundamental. You're not talking in eschatological terms here. Go ahead.

Darrow Miller:

No, I'm not. I'm talking in worldview terms, and people who couch it in eschatological terms are very often thinking from a sacred-secular framework. And this is oh gee, the jews are back in israel. Wow, this is the moment. Well, jesus says we don't know the day or the hour. He didn't know the day or the hour, but we are to be about this disciple nations, or to put it in another way, as christians. The church exists not to bless itself, but the church exists to be a blessing to the nation and to the community in which it is. It's an outward focus and that's part of what we're dealing with. When we're, you know we're, we're okay, we're going to support the jews because these are the end times.

Dwight Vogt:

That's not going deep enough, and what I hear you saying, daryl's just to summarize for myself is that that the root is this idea of a moral, one god who is personal and created the world and everything yeah, that's the bottom line the Jews are at the root of that because it was revealed to them and threw them to the world exactly. So the idea is, if even the secular Jew, who identifies as a Jew, reminds us of that fact, of that fact.

Darrow Miller:

Of that fact, of that reality.

Dwight Vogt:

So all the Jews in the world could become secularists and we'd still be anti-Semites because of that. That's right.

Darrow Miller:

It's a guilty by association.

Luke Allen:

That made so much sense when you guys explained that a few minutes ago, the Jews, even if they don't like God, if they've rejected God, if they hate God and if they've totally turned away from him, they're still wearing the jersey that says God on it.

Scott D. Allen:

Exactly Because that goes back 4,000 years.

Luke Allen:

That goes back a long time and the miracle is that they're still here and they're still wearing.

Dwight Vogt:

You know, and that jersey is still here, yeah, here, and they're still wearing that. You know, and that jersey is still here, yeah, I mean, that's the miracle.

Darrow Miller:

I heard this on a podcast yesterday it's four secular jews talking and they said, yeah, but the miracle is that we still exist.

Dwight Vogt:

Of all those tribes back two, four thousand years ago, we still exist and a lot have just died out from natural causes.

Darrow Miller:

But but the Jews have been hated historically and whole nations have tried to wipe them out, and they're still here, which is a miracle how?

Luke Allen:

can this be it's a miracle.

Darrow Miller:

And it shows that God's hand. He chose them for a reason and they're still here for a reason, and I love what you just said. As you were saying, I was thinking what did Hitler have the Jews wear during the Nazi reign? Star of David, and that's the physical symbol of the Jewish people and that Star of David has never been destroyed.

Scott D. Allen:

Yes, and I'm thinking of people that I know, young Christians, a lot of young Christians that I've heard that there's kind of a soft anti-Semitism that I'm hearing from them right now. Things like you know, the Jews don't really matter anymore. That's the old covenant. We're in the new covenant. You know they're just pagans. We treat them the same as any other pagan.

Darrow Miller:

When you have that kind of thought or conversation, it takes on a different light when we're talking the way we are in this podcast though, well, and do you look at pagans as sinners condemned to hell, or do you see them as the image of God, and Christ died for them, and God wants to reach them?

Scott D. Allen:

Yes, and that needs to be absolutely our heart. But when Hitler went after the Jews and rounded them up and put them on trains and brought them to concentration camps like Auschwitz, he didn't care whether they were pagan Jews who didn't believe or not.

Darrow Miller:

They were just Jews. No, they were Jews Again. The deeper thing isn't you know?

Scott D. Allen:

is this Jew, a believer or not? How serious are they about their faith? The deeper thing is, they represent the worship of the true and living God. Whether they acknowledge that or not, that's what they do.

Darrow Miller:

That's right, and because of that they need to be protected.

Scott D. Allen:

You know we need to protect and be concerned about them. We need to stand with.

Darrow Miller:

You know we need to protect and be concerned about them. We need to stand with them because we worship the same god and if the church if the church in germany had followed bonhoeffer and the other courageous pastors, uh hitler, he would have been done in the 30s. But they sided with Hitler because of the sacred-secular divide, and that's the other thing for Christians today. Are you functioning from a biblical worldview or a sacred-secular worldview? You need to answer that question.

Luke Allen:

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up a second ago, dad about the move in a lot of Christian circles to kind of dismiss Jews as irrelevant now in the New Covenant. Supercessionism, I believe, is what that's called in theological camps, or replacement theology other people call it. We've talked about this plenty as a team and I think Romans 11 portrays this posture of how we should treat the Jews, even the unbelieving Jews today, in such a measured and humble way, and I just think it's unfair to wrap up this conversation without kind of stating that. And it's that classic, we've all heard it, the analogy of the olive tree. Right, god's the olive tree, he's the root, he's the trunk, and then the branches are the Jews and then, because of the hardening of their hearts, many of the Jews, the branches have been cut off and fallen to the ground and you, coming from a wild olive tree, have been grafted in among the branches. But what Paul tries to do very insistently throughout Romans 9 through chapter 11, is insist that don't let this lead you to pride, don't let this don't leave yourself thinking you're better than them here, because God can cut you off as well and he can graft those branches that fell off right back in. He has a heart for them.

Luke Allen:

Still, and I just think remembering that posture and it's repeated in Romans 11, verse 18, romans 11 verse 21,. Romans 11, verse 23, is be careful, don't let this lead you to pride Because, again, like we've talked about today, we have so much in common with them. We have this shared root, you know, and even though they've been cut off, they still came from the same tree, and then some other branches are also in the tree today because of their belief in Jesus. So I think just knowing that having that posture in this conversation is really important is it's so easy to think, well, we're better than them because we're, you know, the new Israel of the second covenant. Like, don't, don't go there, that's just not necessary, and be careful what that leads to because it can lead to this kind of soft dismissal Soft anti Semitism, really Anti-Semitism.

Darrow Miller:

This is why the issue is on a worldview level, not a theological level. Yeah, yeah. And that's not saying anything bad about theology. It's saying you haven't gone deep enough.

Scott D. Allen:

I do think there's a part of it too, luke, is it's rooted in. You know, there's ways of thinking theologically that I think are harmful, and one is to kind of draw these firm lines. You know, god acted in this way at this time and then there's a firm line Now he's acting in an entirely different way. And I think when you draw those kind of thick firm lines between things, you don't see the continuity. And there's such continuity in God's redemptive story, you know, all the way through. That's right and you need to look at those areas of continuity, you know. One of them is what we're talking about.

Scott D. Allen:

Yes, in the old covenant it was with Jews and in the new covenant, through Christ's blood, it's with the church, jew and Gentile. But the continuity is that it's all about the worship of the true and living God and obedience to him and creating a culture as a kingdom of priests. Right, the kingdom of priests idea is applied to the ethnic you know ethnic Jews in the Old Testament and Peter in his epistles applies it to the church in the New. We're a kingdom of priests, a holy nation. Same thing. We're to create that culture rooted in the worship of a living God. That's continuity. I mean God had this all worked out from the beginning. You know he knew the different phases of this plan, or it's unfolding, how it was going to unfold, with Christ at the center of it. But again, I think you have a different view of things and of the Jews when you see the continuity, as opposed to these thick walls that say, oh, they're not relevant because that was just an Old Testament, that was a previous time or whatever it is.

Darrow Miller:

Let me add one other thing to what you just said, scott. It's not simply a religious culture, it's a holistic culture. And you think of luther. He wanted to reform the church. Calvin wanted to reform all of society. When the pilgrims came across the atlantic ocean, they wanted to separate themselves from the persecution of the Church of England and be able to establish a church in the New World. When the Puritans came across, it wasn't just to leave England, it was to establish an entire enterprise.

Darrow Miller:

They wanted to establish a culture that shaped a nation, a way of living, a way of seeing the world, a way of living in their marriages and with their children, a way that affected education. Politics and economics Exactly Rooted in the worship of the living God.

Scott D. Allen:

Yeah, that's what they wanted.

Darrow Miller:

Rooted in the worship and both groups were Christians, but one was focusing on simply the purity of the church and the other was focusing on a civilizational concept. So that's a whole other podcast.

Dwight Vogt:

Yeah, it is another, but it's a good one, which goes back to God's requirements for the Jews. There was not only a sacrificial system, but there was a call to obedience and the sacrificial system said to the Jew it's God who saves me, it's not me that saves myself, but I do obey, I follow, yeah I, I live as god I live as god designed me to live, and I think with, with the reformation the side you're talking about with luther there was a sense of no, it's just the sacrifice.

Dwight Vogt:

There, there's nothing to do with living and how you live, it's just the sacrifice. There, there's nothing to do with living and how you live, it's just the sacrifice, for by grace are you saved, through faith, not of yourselves. The gift of god. And we've just lost, you know, but the puritans didn't lose that the pilgrims might have yeah, I think you're.

Scott D. Allen:

You're right to bring that up, dwayne. We, hey, I'm a proud protestant and lutheran in the sense that I believe that we're saved exclusively through faith and not by good works. Right, it's not our good works that save us, that's the old covenant. It doesn't work because we're, you know, god is utterly holy and even our good works are, you know, filthy rags, so you're never going to be able to have that restored relationship with God through good works.

Scott D. Allen:

You're saved through faith, but the whole point of that is to do good works, you know, to live in a way that pleases him and that honors him in every area.

Dwight Vogt:

And yeah, I was just struck by that this morning. The Jews understood that and the Jews yeah, they did.

Scott D. Allen:

I want to go back again, yeah, and.

Luke Allen:

I mean with that it's good to keep in mind when we're talking about worldviews, and the uniting worldview that we have with the Jews here is we're not moral relativists here Is these ideas, even if it's kind of works based, they're still going to lead to idea consequences and the Jewish ideas that are based in the Old Testament and the moral law that God given to them and us are going to lead to good consequences to them and us are going to lead to good consequences. And if you're doing that from a you know, out of the wrong reasons because of you know workspace kind of you know, wherever you're coming from, it's still going to lead to good consequences because of God's natural law. So when we're comparing Judaism to other worldviews, it's very different compared to other worldviews out there.

Scott D. Allen:

As we wrap this up today, darrell, I'd just like you to share with us any final thoughts. I just think. Again, I want to direct people to Darrow Miller and friends at the blog site, and specifically to this blog Getting to the Root of Antisemitism. I think, darrow, it's a really important contribution to all of the discussion that's happening right now and I just want our listeners to take advantage of that.

Darrow Miller:

But final thoughts from you, darrow, as we wrap up today Well, I think we need to take the times in which we live seriously.

Darrow Miller:

And the times in which we live, they are not just post-Christian, they're post-modern, and we are on a track that's rejected the Bible, it's rejected reason and it's rejected reality. And if Christians don't understand the times in which we live, we're just going to sort of fumble along or we'll stick our heads in the sand. The world is waiting for us, as Christians, to stand up and function, not from a dualistic worldview where we've separated the sacred and the secular, but a comprehensive worldview in which we take the reality of there being one God who unifies the whole, and we are representing that God and the unity of the whole, and that should set our vision and part of the unity of the whole. Right now, in light of this great anti-Semitism in our country and sweeping the world, we need to join hands with the ones who God chose to reveal himself to the world. We need to join hands with the Jewish people and stand with them in this hour of their persecution.

Scott D. Allen:

Darrell, thanks for your time today and for your writing your thoughts on this.

Darrow Miller:

It's really important.

Scott D. Allen:

Dwight and Luke, thank you for your great contribution as well to this conversation and again, to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning into another episode of. Ideas have Consequences. This is the podcast of the Disciple Nations Alliance.

People on this episode

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Scott Allen

Host
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Darrow Miller

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Dwight Vogt

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Shawn Carson

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Tim Williams

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Luke Allen

Producer