I want to talk about a topic I think most Christians won’t like, but I feel burdened to talk about it, so please if you start reading the next line, keep reading to the end…otherwise you will get the wrong idea. Growing up in a Christian family meant I had neutral feelings towards Israel or the Jews. But as I started reading the Bible starting from the Old Testament at the age of 16 I started to be really impressed by the Jews because of their rich history, God’s mighty work among them, and their lasting legacy. When all other civilizations disappeared they still existed. And being a teenager and wanting to find a purpose in life and belong to something, I really considered going to Israel and becoming a Jewish Rabbi!!! Later on when I came to Canada and started reading novels about the Holocaust I again admired the Jews for their endurance.
However, at the age of 16 I accepted Jesus Christ in my life, and so when I moved to Canada and started growing in my relationship with Him I started to see things differently. The more I understood Him, the more I realized He cares about both Jews and Arabs. The more I knew Him, the more I realized He loved and desired to save all people regardless of their history or religious beliefs.
Among Christians however, I saw a different picture. I see, all the time, on TV, ministries, pastors, and TV hosts say, “Let’s bow down to pray for peace in the Middle Eastâ€, and when they start praying all they ask for is for the safety of the nation of Israel and for the Jews to be saved! Since there are other countries in the Middle East beside Israel and they are at war with Israel and we only pray for the safety of Israel, then for God to answer those prayers He pretty much has to destroy all those nations around Israel and the people living there! It does not sound like a prayer our Lord Jesus Christ would pray, does it?
Not once have I heared a pastor pray for Iraq or Afghanistan! We see those nations as our “enemies†and that God is just waiting to punish them, not realizing that God sees those nations as ready for spiritual harvest because of the amount of hurting souls that are so yearning to find Him and accept Him in their lives.
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When I go to churches I see the Israeli flag on the wall! Not a single Christian asked himself or herself, “What if an Arab is so hurt and is looking for God and came to church looking for Him and the first thing he saw is the flag of the people he was taught from his childhood that are his enemies!†What happened to our spiritual discernment? Why have our allegiance moved from to Christ to a country? Why are we trying to build a physical home here on earth when our Lord clearly said that He is going to prepare a place for us in heaven?! Why are our concerns political rather than spiritual? Why do we choose who is worthy to go to heaven and who is not? Why do we have the right to say there is a chance for those people to accept Jesus, but not those people?!
When was the last time a church has prayed for an Iraqi? My friend who is 22 years old had an older brother who died in the army at the age of 18. He was coming back from the battlefield and he froze in the snow on the mountains of north Iraq. His family found him after few days frozen to death in 3 feet of snow. His dad died when he was still a child; he died covering my friend from a hail of bullets fired at their car by Saddam’s army.
A widow Christian lady who was my grandparent’s neighbor in Baghdad had both of her sons, age 23 and 19 (one was studying pharmacology and the other engineering at the University of Baghdad) taken away from university by Saddam’s secret police and she never heard about them again to the day she died about 18 years later—imagine the pain she lived through all those years alone. A relative of mine died about a year ago in my city because a terrorist blew up the bus he was riding home from university—he was studying pharmacology too.
Who prays for those people? Who prays for their families? When I meet Iraqis I meet people who are so ready to receive Christ. People only Christ can heal their wounds. Who knows the pain my friend is going through because of his dad’s and brother’s death? Who prays for him?
Iraqis come from broken homes and it is very common that one family has sons and daughters in different countries, while the parents are somewhere else. And most of those families have a family member (or more) who died in the wars of Saddam, executed without a trial, or mentally disturbed because of the torture that person endured either by Saddam’s regime or by the years of being a prisoner of war.
Most Iraqis I see in Canada are working for minimum wages because Saddam made the life in Iraq so difficult that most young men just ran away to other countries where they didn’t have families to support them so they could find their talents, or get education, yet they are some of the funniest, kindest, and most humble people I know.
For a long time I felt some kind of discrimination towards Iraqis by Arabs from other countries. (Not by Canadians; Canadians are some of the most respectful, awesome, and tolerant people I’ve known.) For example the parents of an Arabic girl don’t want her to marry an Iraqi man. This could be mainly because as I mentioned above that a lot of Iraqis don’t seem to have a “future†from a human perspective. So on top of all their hurts, they are discriminated against! But I never said anything to anyone because I didn’t want anybody think that I was making things up, even though I sensed this for many years. But a couple of days ago when my uncle was driving me home after church he mentioned that other Arabs view us as “sub-humansâ€! I was stunned that someone else has noticed that too. Sadly, this is true even among Arab “Christiansâ€.
I think another misconception here in the west we have is that if a person “looks†and “acts†holy then they don’t need Christ! This can’t be further from the truth! No one needed Christ as much as the apostle Paul did! I don’t care what the person is wearing, and how long his beard is, or how holy that person acts! There is no righteousness apart from Christ’s blood, and there is not purity but the purity of the heart that only comes from a changed heart by the work of the Holy Spirit, and there is no joy and peace apart from a personal relationship with our heavenly Father, through the death of Christ.
Some of the most awesome and passionate testimonies I’ve heard are of Arabs coming to know Christ. These are people that are yearning for truth for so long and when they finally find it they don’t seem to be able to get over their joy, even many years later. Almost all of those testimonies include Jesus Christ appearing to them in a vision…often times more than once. If that’s how much Jesus loves them and values them, why don’t we? What if someone has said, “Let’s not translate More Than A Carpenter to Arabic because those people will not get saved anyway!†then I would probably still be living without Christ today!
So please next time you pray for the nation of Israel also pray for the Palestinians who are dying by air strikes, and losing their sons to becoming terrorists. And pray for those little kids who are being fooled into believing that committing suicide and taking the lives of many with them is actually God’s will for their lives. Pray for the so many families being driven from their homes, the homes of their fathers and grandfathers, everything they ever knew. Pray for the Palestinian kids who don’t have enough food to eat, clothes wear, or electricity to study. Who don’t have any kind of security. Pray with a heart of Christ for the purpose of Christ.
“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.†2 Peter 3:9
Next time you pray, don’t think that you don’t like that regime, or that president, and think that God doesn’t like them either. May be you don’t like the president of Iran, but God still wants him and the people of Iran to come to repentance and enter into a personal relationship with Him.
