Yesterday I discovered an astonishing audio recording of a sermon, by controversial McCain endorser Pastor John Hagee, in which Hagee elaborates on his view that Hitler and the Nazis were divine agents, sent by God to (with gruesome inefficiency it would seem) chase Europe’s Jews towards Palestine. In his 2006 book “Jerusalem Countdown”,
Hagee proposed that anti-Semitism, and thus the Holocaust, was the fault of Jews themselves – the result of an age old divine curse incurred by the ancient Hebrews through worshiping idols and passed, down the ages, to all Jews now alive. In the sermon Hagee also clarifies a point, on his theological views, that has long concerned me…
[Note: excerpt from John Hagee sermon, given probably in the late 1990’s – with its themes plied into the John Hagee books “Battle For Jerusalem” (2001, reprinted 2003) and “Jerusalem Countdown” (2006), begins 1:00 minute into the video]
To assert that any human group is somehow spiritually different from the rest of humanity is the most extreme form of racist bigotry. In the sermon recording I discovered, John Hagee does just that: Hagee clearly states his theological view that Jews are not “spiritually alive”. Hence, John Hagee singles out Jews as being of a lesser order than other humans: subhuman. In his sermon, Pastor Hagee asks how God will get Jews, whom Hagee refer to as “dry bones”, to go back to the land of Israel.
As an answer John Hagee cites Jeremiah 16, verses 15 and following:
Jer. 16, verses 15-18 15
“but, ‘The Lord lives who brought up the Children of Israel from the kand of the north and from all the lands where he had driven them. ‘ For I will bring them back into their land which I gave to their fathers.
16 “Behold, I will send for many fisherman,” says The Lord, “and they shall fish them; and afterward I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.
17 “For My eyes are on all their way; they are not hidden from My face, nor is their iniquity hidden from My eyes.
18 “And first I will repay double for their iniquity and their sin, because they have defiled My land; they have filled My inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable idols.”
In citing Jeremiah 16, Hagee implies that God caused the Holocaust because of Jewish “iniquity” and “sin”, and for filling God’s “inheritance with the carcasses of their detestable and abominable idols.”
Hagee cites
Ezekiel, chapter 37, the “Dry Bones” prophecy, and Hagee states that Jews living today are at Ezekiel 37:8:
Indeed, as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them over; but there was no breath in them.
The context, of the whole prophecy, is of course highly important and here are the key parts:
11 Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel…
