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(AgapePress) - The president and CEO of Global Evangelism Television says the Presbyterian Church (USA) has brought the judgment of God upon that denomination by attacking Israel.
Recently the General Assembly of the PC(USA) voted overwhelmingly in favor of a universal divestment from companies that do business with Israel, and equated the Jewish state with South Africa during apartheid. But Dr. John Hagee, pastor of 17,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, says Presbyterians who have abandoned Israel have forgotten that it is the only nation created by a sovereign act of God.
"Presbyterians who take a stand against Israel have forgotten that God gave Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their seed -- the Jewish people -- an eternal and everlasting covenant in Genesis 13 and Genesis 15, that the land of Israel would be theirs forever," Hagee says. "And that covenant is valid in the year 2004," he adds, "and will be valid, according to God, as long as the sun shines in the heavens and the moon reflects its light at night."
The well-known evangelical pastor says those who oppose Israel are opposing the nation God calls His own inheritance and the people He refers to as the apple of His eye. It was the Jewish people, Hagee reminds his fellow-believers, who gave to Christianity the Word of God, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and, of course, the first family of Christianity -- Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.
"Any person of any denomination who calls himself a Christian must always remember that the foundations of our faith are established in the word of God," Hagee says. "Anyone -- being Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic, Baptist, Assemblies of God, et cetera -- who abandons Israel, has either forgotten what the word of God says or has willfully chosen to forsake the foundations of our faith."
Presbyterians and others should be sending support to Israel, Hagee insists, rather than condemning the Jewish State based on articles they are reading in the New York Times. And quite apart from the debt that Christianity owes to Judaism, he asserts that, geopolitically speaking, Israel should be supported because it is the only true democracy in the Middle East today.