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Palestinians inspect a destroyed building after an Israeli air strike in the city of Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on April 25, 2024.Anas-Mohammed / Shutterstock

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(LifeSiteNews) — The entire Jewish religion of the Old Testament was ordered to its fulfillment in the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, Who Himself is the Temple of God, the eternal land of the promises given to Abraham, and the “Ecclesia, the gathering of God’s covenant people,” explained Christendom College theology professor Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas in an interview last month with Crisis Magazine.

With Israel continuing its genocidal rampage against the people in Gaza, and now also the West Bank, the topic of Zionism is being widely discussed since it is precisely this ideology which continues to provide a pretext and impetus for the Israeli state to violently expel the Palestinian people from the lands they have resided in for many centuries.

According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the notion of expelling all Arabs from the land “is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.” Indeed, in the late 1930s, David Ben-Gurion, who became Israel’s first prime minister, stated, “After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” He later projected in 1941, “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.”

In 1947-48, this project began in earnest when Jewish forces compelled more than 700,000 Palestinians to flee for their lives abandoning their homes, lands, and livelihoods. The Zionist army then barred them from returning. These people, with their descendants, now make up more than 5.9 million refugees distributed in Gaza (70 percent of the overall population), Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank, with the right to return to their homeland recognized under international law.

In an interview last November, Colonel Douglas Macgregor emphasized this long-standing goal of the Zionist project to expel the Palestinian people from their land, calling the current attack “the first stage in a multistage operation designed to create ‘greater Israel’ from the Jordan River all the way to the Mediterranean.” The Israelis have made this goal “abundantly clear off-and-on for many years. This is not a secret. Now it’s happening.”

Fueling the movement of these attacks is the ideology of religious Zionism, which in his August 15 interview, Tsakanikas described as the belief “that people who claim to be of Jewish ancestry are returning to their Jewish homeland in fulfillment of God’s promise of a new Exodus.” Thus, as a fulfillment of prophesy, these people claim a divine mandate to occupy and to even violently dispossess the Palestinian people of the homeland where they have lived for many centuries.

“I absolutely reject that [theological interpretation] in every possible way because Jesus is the fulfillment of all Old Testament prophecies,” said the professor who earned his Sacrae Theologiae Doctor at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome.

Old Covenant Israel not ‘replaced,’ or ‘superseded’ but fulfilled and ‘reconstituted’ in Christ

Drawing from his recent article on the topic, Tsakanikas addressed erroneous classifications of Catholic doctrine on the delicate question of the Jews. Many Christian Zionists, including even some Catholics, have attempted to frame these teachings in specious categories they refer to as “supersessionism” or “replacement theology.” According to these frameworks, since the Jews rejected Christ, their covenant through Moses was rejected by God and replaced, or “superseded,” by the New Covenant in Christ. And some suggest this separation of the old and new covenants indicates there are actually “dual covenants,” the New which saves Christians, and the Old by which the Jews may still be saved.

READ: Zionism is incompatible with Christianity: here’s why

“No, we don’t accept a dual covenant, and there’s not one covenant for the Jews and one covenant for the Christians. The one covenant was always working towards the Messiah,” the professor told host Eric Sammons. “So the real religion God always wanted was the religion, in Greek, of the Khristós (the Christ).”

And thus, since “the Khristós has come,” the Catholic Faith “is what Judaism was always meant to be. It’s not being replaced. So, you can’t have either a dual covenant or a replacement covenant,” he said. Rather, God has reconstituted Israel “through the development of his promises and covenants to where God intended those promises and covenant to arrive, which was always at the Messiah.”

Old and New covenants represent promise and fulfillment of just ‘one religion, God’s religion’

Citing another essay he wrote, Tsakanikas explained how even the Jewish Talmud expected the Messiah to arrive “at the time of Jesus of Nazareth” and yet they misunderstood him for his kingdom is spiritual and not of this world (John 18:36).

“And so Jesus has been reigning from heaven, like Psalm II says, ‘Sit at my right hand till I make your enemies my footstool,’” the professor continued. “So in other words, the religion of the Messiah, the Khristós, has now spread around the world. A Jew, the greatest Jew of them all, has brought billions of people to sing the Jewish Psalms. He’s fulfilling everything that Judaism promised of bringing all nations to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is the Son of David. This is who was being awaited, but you interpreted it all too physically and earthly.”

“God’s promises are always more about the spiritual fulfillment. You can’t have someone reigning forever without someone transcending time, and you can’t have any of this without the divinity of God being shared with man,” Tsakanikas observed. “That’s what Christianity is all about, and that’s what Judaism was always working towards. And so there’s no replacement.” Instead, it is “Israel being brought to the promises it was always meant to be brought to.”

Thus, “it’s a smooth transition, so to speak, of one religion, God’s religion, that is being promised and then being fulfilled,” Sammons summarized. “You can’t say that modern Judaism is a separate covenant that somehow saves, it just goes against everything in the Bible and Catholic theology.”

Nation and land necessary to prepare for the coming of Christ, not after

With regards to the Zionist notion that Jews today are entitled to the land of Palestine, Tsakanikas explained this is not the case since the promises of the land have already been fulfilled (Josh 21:43-45, 1Kgs 8:56, Neh 9:7-8) as a means of bringing about the salvation of the world through the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

God worked in stages to bring this about, beginning with his promises given to Abraham of a land and nation from whom would come a dynasty and kings which would culminate in a worldwide blessing.

This was necessary because the human race would not know how to seek or recognize the Messiah “unless there are prophecies for a long time,” and one would have to know the genealogy this person would come from as well. “So God certainly had to have a nation, but to have a nation, you need land. So what did God do? Through Moses he establishes the deliverance of the land under Joshua,” the theologian recounted.

The necessity of the land was “to establish the people to keep God’s law and as God led them forward into the wisdom tradition, not just a legal keeping of law” but practice of virtue, he said. And so the Wisdom literature emerges through Solomon, and then ultimately from this line the “promised child of the Son of David, who is going to bring the whole world into accepting this one true God” fulfilling the promise to Abraham. That’s Jesus Christ.”

“So in other words, once the Messiah comes, the land no longer matters as much and is no longer essential to the promises, the race no longer matters” either since the Gospel is intended for all, Jew and Greek alike (Gal 3:28), which was God’s original goal “to bring humanity into family with God.”

Land represented communion with God, following incarnation ‘Jesus is the land’

The theologian explained that this goal of familial communion with the Holy Trinity is accomplished by “sharing in the Holy Spirit, his eternity and divinity,” which comes from the Messiah, the “Spirit giver,” the “bridge between heaven and earth.” And as a result, “the true law is life in the Holy Spirit which builds virtue and freedom.”

Therefore, Tsakanikas summarized, “Jesus is now the land,” which means “God’s promise to Abraham has been fulfilled in the religion of the Messiah, as was always the goal of the three promises. And so if you have received the Holy Spirit, then Holy Spirit is eternal life and divinity, and that’s what God was always promising you were going to share in. That’s the covenant that God would give you, eternal life, and you would have communion with God. So if you have eternal life through the Messiah, you’re living in the land.”

“The meek inherit the land because they’ve truly surrendered their will to God and stopped thinking in a human earthly real estate way” (Mt 5:5), he continued. Through an actual knowledge and love of God “in spirit and truth… eternal life has infused us and is pulling us up. We’re already partaking in the heavenly kingdom. That’s the land.”

Or as fifth century Doctor of the Church, Pope St. Leo the Great, affirmed, “To the meek and gentle, to the humble and modest… the earth is promised for their possession. And this is not to be reckoned a small or cheap inheritance, as if it were distinct from our heavenly dwelling, since it is no other than these who are understood to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Christ the new Temple, land, Ecclesia, fulfillment of the promises made to Israel

As a “microcosm of the land,” the Old Testament temple always represented communion with God, he explained. And thus, “whenever Moses went into the tent temple, he came out radiating divinity” symbolizing that he was “partaking in the true land, God’s divinity” the promise that the Israelites were blocked from, even as they remained in the physical land striving to live in God’s law so as to “eventually enter the temple again.”

'It reasonably follows, that those self-professed Christians who adopt this serious theological error, and act either through commission or omission to achieve its ends, alongside radical Jewish Zionists, are actively advancing an anti-Christ agenda.'

With Jesus Christ Himself revealed as the Temple of God in sacred scripture, it is that temple, that communion with God, which “now comes to us out of heaven through the resurrected body and blood of Jesus that shares his resurrected life of the Holy Spirit with us.”

“That’s the temple, that’s the land, that’s the Ecclesia, the gathering of God’s covenant people. That’s the New Israel, not a replacement of old Israel, [but] Israel being brought to the promises it was always meant to be brought to,” the professor said.

Just one authentic Israel: Jesus Christ and His Mystical Body, The Catholic Church

Through typology the Church also understands how Jesus Christ fulfills the entire Old Testament including his being the “New Adam,” the “New Moses,” the New Abraham (as the beginning of the New Covenant), the New Isaac (the beloved son sacrificed by the Father), and the New Jacob / Israel selecting twelve apostles to be the foundation of the reconstituted Israel, the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, the New Temple, as the means of salvation for Jews and Gentiles alike.

Summarizing these points, Sammons concurred there is thus just one authentic Israel, which today remains the Catholic Church. “It’s the same Israel, but it’s also new. You can say both things are true. And, really, the land is Jesus Christ, the temple is Jesus Christ.”

Therefore, nothing in divine revelation, Scripture or Tradition, has anything to do with the modern state which calls itself “Israel.” There has to be an “absolute distinction” between the true Israel, the Church, and the modern secular state which has taken the same name, Tsakanikas said. “In no way is [this modern state] the fulfillment of a prophesy, and I’d have to warn people in fact trying to encourage it because you think it’s prophetic could be a part of leading to what is Christian apostasy.”

For example, commenting further, the professor said, “to pretend that there’s a dual covenant” which Jews can live without having to accept Jesus Christ, equates to committing apostasy, which the Catechism of the Catholic Church defines as “the total repudiation of the Christian faith.”

Those who do so “have rejected Jesus who is the true land, the true temple, and the true gathering,” he said. They have “offered someone something other than Jesus. In my opinion, Christians when they do that are entering into apostasy.”

Christians are the heirs to the promises given to Abraham

Sacred scripture confirms that even Abraham looked beyond the physical land in seeking the fulfillment of the promises given to him by God, which included the coming of Christ as the blessing for “all the nations of the earth” (Gen 22: 18).

The book of Hebrews states, in “seeking a homeland,” Abraham “looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God… a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.”

Thus, Sammons observed Abraham “was a Christian in the sense that he was awaiting Christ,” and as affirmed by Jesus Christ himself, Abraham “rejoiced that he was to see my day; he saw it and was glad” (John 8:56).

Hence, the promises given to Abraham are ordered to their fulfillment in Jesus Christ, with the heirs to these promises being those who are in Christ and are thus members of the same reconstituted Israel of the New Covenant. As St. Paul teaches:

Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring. It does not say, ‘And to offsprings,’ referring to many; but, referring to one, ‘And to your offspring,’ which is Christ … And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise (Gal 3: 16, 29).

St. Peter: Jews who reject Christ are ‘completely cut off’ from the People of God

Though the New Israel consisting of those baptized into Christ is confirmed as being the children of Abraham, and thus heirs to the promises given to him, Sammons asked if there remains any theological argument supporting the Zionist assertion that this specific land of ancient Israel still belongs to the Jewish people.

“Quite the opposite,” answered Tsakanikas, “the land is not theirs according to Christianity,” as God determined the land, including Jerusalem, to be “trodden down by the Gentiles” until the second coming (Luke 21:24), while also having promised in scripture that those Jews who reject the Messiah will be cut off from the People of God.

Teaching in the Temple area in Acts 3, St. Peter affirmed that those Jews who sadly reject Jesus Christ are “cut off” from the People of God, and therefore the promises given to them as well:

For Moses said, ‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you must listen to everything he tells you. Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off from their people’ (vs. 22-23).

In other words, the reconstituted Israel, the People of God, are those who are in Jesus Christ, the giver of the Holy Spirit and of the New Covenant (Jer 31: 31-33), while those who tragically reject him are cut off from that one people who remain the heirs to the promises given to Abraham.

As recalled by Dr. Tsakanikas, this was also affirmed by Jesus Christ who, concluding the parable of the tenants of the vineyard (Mt 21: 33-46), promised the land would be taken away from the Jews for their rejection and killing of the Messiah and handed over to the Gentiles, “I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a nation producing the fruits of it.”

The Lord Jesus also lamented the coming destruction of Jerusalem, including the Temple, which would happen as a result of their rejecting of the Son of God, and the prophets before him (Mt 23: 37-39, Luke 19:43-44). Unfortunately, this tragically happened in 70 A.D. when the Romans destroyed the second temple on the exact same month and day the original temple, built by Solomon, had been destroyed almost 600 years earlier by the Babylonians.

Summarizing these realities in an Epiphany sermon included in the Liturgy of the Hours, Pope St. Leo the Great (d. 461) preached, “Let the children of the promise now receive the blessing in the seed of Abraham, the blessing renounced by the children of his flesh… This is the day that Abraham saw, and rejoiced to see, when he knew that the sons born of his faith would be blessed in his seed, that is, in Christ. Believing that he would be the father of the nations, he looked into the future, giving glory to God, in full awareness that God is able to do what he has promised.”

Religious Zionism ‘rightly called anti-Christ,’ logical cause of profound anti-Christ consequences

Of course, Tsakanikas affirms, “The Jews are not excluded from the offer to enter Jesus, the true Land who gives us rest: ‘Come to me, all who labor and are heavy ladened, and I will give you rest’ (Matthew 11:28).” Following the coming of Jesus Christ and His making accessible his supernatural gifts, the old covenant promises of physical land give way to their proper end of sanctifying grace, a share in divine life (2 Peter 1:4), and eternal beatitude, our true promised homeland. “God is our rest in the Holy Spirit, not a temporal and physical geography.”

'As should be obvious, repudiation of Jesus Christ and sound Christian doctrine, either explicitly or implicitly, through direct advocacy of anti-Christ Zionism or merely failing to oppose such a heresy, can have astronomical life and death consequences.'

With the entire old covenant being ordered to fulfillment in the Messiah Jesus Christ (Rom 10:4), these are the “gifts and the call of God” which are irrevocable (Rom 11:29) that were offered first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles alike.

Interpreting the old covenant, and the promises given to Abraham, apart from their ordered and purposeful fulfillment in Jesus Christ, is naturally judged to be a rejection of God’s clear plan for the salvation of the world, which every Christian should recognize. In this way, Tsakanikas deduces, religious Zionism pits itself “against God’s revealed Messiah, and so it is rightly called anti-Christ.”

It reasonably follows, that those self-professed Christians who adopt this serious theological error, and act either through commission or omission to achieve its ends, alongside radical Jewish Zionists, are actively advancing an anti-Christ agenda, which will logically lead to profound anti-Christ consequences in the world.

Two millennia of Christian moral development aggressively rejected with genocidal and sadistic atrocities

Such results can be seen in the Israeli army’s even zealous rejection of natural morality which remains reasonably based on the inestimable dignity of the human person.

As a clear result of the incarnation of God in the Person of Jesus Christ, over the last two millennia there have been developments in understanding morality and law which have made the world much more human regardless of creed. While the essence of such natural moral principles is accessible to reason alone, they have been authoritatively articulated and defined by the teaching of the New Israel, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

They have also guided the establishment of law throughout the world, including international law which has been systematically ignored by the Zionist Israeli government for decades with its anti-Christ agenda coming into great relief in the last 11 months amid reports of the Israeli army committing genocidal and even sadistic atrocities, almost daily, against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank.

Though massacres by the Israeli army against this decimated people have been routine occurrences for decades, reliable reports of Palestinian deaths since October 7 of last year includes at least 41,662 (40,972 in Gaza, 16,715 children, 11,308 women) with 10,000 more buried under the rubble (est. 4,900 women and children), and at least 691 in the West Bank (~148 children), with 500,000 facing food insecurity and 37 deaths of children attributed to malnutrition.

Such deaths include testimonies of children “incinerated,” “shredded,” “missing body parts,” “being crushed by buildings,” starving to death and toddlers being “definitively” and intentionally shot by Israeli snipers. (WATCH CRUCIAL video,)

Soldiers in the anti-Christ Zionist army have also uploaded videos to social media celebrating their “extreme brutality and torture, violence, [and] utter disrespect for human life” with regards to their treatment of the Palestinian civilians.

Furthermore, one Israeli human rights organization has documented the transformation of 12 Israeli prisons into “de-facto torture camps” for deliberate subjection of Palestinian detainees “to harsh, relentless pain and suffering” with most never even being charged with a crime.

Tortures in these camps include public confirmation of sodomizing detainees with reports of Israeli soldiers “inserting objects into detainees’ anuses,” such as, in at least one case, “a telephone device” with “additional accessories,” which the Zionist army torturers then called for sadistic amusement. As of July 31, 53 Palestinian detainees were known to have died in these torture camps.

Brazen lies in saturating Zionist propaganda, anti-Christ consequences may include nuclear war

Furthermore, anti-Christ Zionism is known for practicing massive and systematic propaganda deceit to maintain their brutal genocidal and expansionist agenda in Palestinian territory. Having caught a radical Zionist rabbi blatantly lying in a live streamed debate, Catholic commentator Candace Owens recently observed that Zionism “takes so many lies to maintain” and that its apologists have an ability to blatantly lie and feel no remorse.

As is well-documented, such brazen lies were on full display in July when Zionist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before the U.S. Congress repeating long-debunked atrocity propaganda about the events of October 7, blaming Hamas for the deaths of perhaps hundreds of Israelis who were intentionally killed by the Israeli army themselves that same day, and ironically made the false allegation that protesters were being paid by Iran while standing before the Israel Lobby’s “bought and paid for” U.S. Congress which afforded him 58 standing ovations in a 60 minute speech.

READ: Netanyahu utilizes ‘big lie’ tactic in address to US Congress, receives 58 standing ovations

The anti-Christ Zionist consequences of massive systematic lies, deception, torture and murder on an industrial scale, are not even limited to the Middle East but now threaten the world with a nuclear Armageddon. As Netanyahu escalates to provoke Lebanon and Iran into a regional war, which could involve Russia and the United States in direct conflict, Israel’s war doctrine to launch their own nuclear weapons rather than negotiate, if it considers itself facing military defeat, is also a possibility in facing these formidable foes.

False Christian theology at the heart of anti-Christ Zionist power in the West, ‘injuring America’

As should be obvious, repudiation of Jesus Christ and sound Christian doctrine, either explicitly or implicitly, through direct advocacy of anti-Christ Zionism or merely failing to oppose such a heresy, can have astronomical life and death consequences.

“The reason Israel has such influence on American politics today is because so many Christians, including Catholics, in America, have this false theology,” lamented Sammons.

“We need to hold our American politicians accountable for this,” Tsakanikas concluded. “America is being hurt by not properly speaking out” and acting virtually as the only nation “defending some of the indefensible illegal activities” being committed by the Zionist Israeli regime. “It’s injuring Americans and it’s injuring America.”

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