A flawed foundation lies under most evangelicals’ understanding of God's moral dealings with humanity and particularly Jews. This foundation drives their support of the Jewish state. It is called “Scofield Dispensationalism.” It says that throughout successive epics, or "dispensations," of time God has revealed Himself through extremely different moral standards. The law given before the Flood was different from the law after. The law given to Moses is completely different from what we now observe in the millennia after Christ. Cyrus Scofield lived at the turn of the 20th century and created an annotated Bible which claimed to lay out each dispensation's unique requirements.
Scofield's commentaries have greatly influenced evangelicals to this day. Written at the dawn of the modern Zionist movement, they suggested a nation of suffering and persecuted Jews, though Christ-rejecting, had a divine right to return and occupy Palestine. This idea was virtually absent from Christianity before the mid-1800s. How did such permission gain so great a foothold that it’s now unquestioned dogma for most evangelicals?
It starts with a defect in the King James Bible. King James scholars mistranslated 2 Thess. 2:7.
For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only He who now letteth [restrains] will let, until He be taken out of the way. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming…
The actual New Testament Greek says the one who restrains, the Holy Spirit, is not passively removed. Instead He "gets out of the way" or "steps aside" (ek meseu genetai). The Holy Spirit is never going to be taken out of this world. God owns the world. He is not about to be removed by a mere satanically inhabited man, Anti-Christ.
For hundreds of years Christians were unbothered by the King James Bible's error. Yet in the first half of the 19th century, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, Edward Irving, seized on the mistranslated passage. He saw its profound prophetic implications. He said that since the Holy Spirit would be removed from this world just prior to revealing of Anti-Christ, so Christ's church must also be removed, for Christians cannot function without the Holy Spirit. That removal is described, they said, in 1 Thess. 4:16.
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