I, like many of you, am glued to the television watching the primaries and, of course, McCain is now representing the Republican party. I was rather intrigued by the fact that he stood next to John Hagee and said he was proud to receive the endorsement of John Hagee. I think if John McCain had a little more insight into what John Hagee taught he might not be so proud of that endorsement.
John Hagee, among other things, calls the Roman Catholic church the great whore of Babylon depicted in Revelation 17. This is nonsense. He is a replacement theologian who believes that Israel will replace the church as the focus of God’s plans during the Tribulation and not only so, but that two thirds of the Jews are going to be slaughtered in a holocaust that’s going to make the Nazi holocaust pale by comparison and that in the not-too-distant future.
He has the temerity to call others replacement theologians because they don’t distinguish between people on the basis of race. I am to John Hagee a replacement theologian which, of course, is nonsense. I simply don’t think that God, in any way, judges people on the basis of race. Rahab was a Canaanite and yet she was true Israel because she believed in Yahweh, the God of Israel. Ruth was a Moabite, the archenemy of Israel, and yet she was a true Israel because she believed in Yahweh, the God of Israel. If you look at Esther you see that the nations look on and see how the sovereign God raises up Esther, and the text tells us that many different people from many different nations became Jews. They didn’t change their birth mother, but they believed in Yahweh, the God of Israel. So again, this has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with relationship.
Of course, he wants an ethnically exclusive state in the Middle East and says that God has given Jerusalem only to the Jews. He has gone so far as to say that if America divides Jerusalem there will be no forgiveness – that America will end up on the ash heap of history. So anyone that wants a two-state solution in the Middle East and believes that God does not put Arabs on a different footing than Jews, that we, at the foot of the cross are equal, he will denounce. For him that’s poking your finger in the eye of God.
Again, I think that if John McCain understood what this man teaches he would be as quick to distance himself from John Hagee as Barack Obama was to distance himself from Louis Farrakhan, who is also a racist. We need to know what these people teach. Unfortunately, because they’re visible, a lot of people assume that they represent evangelicalism in some strange way and, as a result, marginalize Christians. This is not the case. We do not, in any way, hold to what John Hagee teaches.
