God Keeps Israel — Not Donald Trump |
“He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.” (Psalm 121:4)
Standing beside the Emir of Qatar at the G7 summit in Evian this week, with a memorandum on Iran days from signing and a rebuke for Jerusalem already on his lips, President Donald Trump said something that no friend of Israel should let pass without an answer. “Without the United States, there would be no Israel,” he declared. “Without me, there would be no Israel, because no other president was willing to do what I did.”
Let me say plainly what I am not saying. I am not ungrateful. The United States has been, in our generation, the truest friend the Jewish state has had among the nations. I have spent my life teaching Christians to stand with Israel, and I have praised this president’s policies when they deserved praise — the embassy in Jerusalem, the pressure on Tehran, the refusal to flatter Israel’s enemies. Gratitude to a friend is a biblical duty, and Israel owes thanks to many friends.
But there is a word for what was said in Evian, and the word is not gratitude. It is a boast. And Scripture is not silent about the boasts of great men who imagine that the survival of God’s covenant people rests upon their own arm.
Begin with the verse above, and begin with the truth it carries: the Keeper does not sleep. The psalmist does not say that Israel is kept by treaties, by armies, by patrons, or by presidents. “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.” The Keeper........