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A hate-filled person slaughtered people that he verbally persecuted:

The Pittsburgh Synagogue Attack: What We Know

October 28, 2018

A gunman opened fire inside Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday during morning services, killing 11 people and wounding six more, including four police officers.

The suspect in custody is identified as 46-year-old Robert Bowers, who shouted “all Jews must die” as he opened fire.

The Anti-Defamation League described the mayhem as “likely the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States.”

Pittsburgh Director of Public Safety Wendell Hissrich says the scene inside the synagogue was “horrific. One of the worst that I’ve seen.”

The FBI is handling the investigation as a hate crime. Bowers was charged with 11 counts of criminal homicide, six counts of aggravated assault and 13 counts of ethnic intimidation.

Blood donation banks in Pittsburgh extended their hours for people who wanted to donate.

New York and Los Angeles added extra security precautions around houses of worship as news of the carnage became known.

President Donald Trump deplored the attack, saying, “The vile, hate-filled poison of anti-Semitism must be condemned.”

Trump suggested the U.S. “stiffen” its death penalty laws in response to the crime. https://www.voanews.com/a/the-pittsburgh-synagogue-attack-what-we-know/4632321.html

Trump-hating, Jew-hating terrorist murders Jewish Americans at Saturday synagogue slaughter

… a deranged, Trump-hating, Jew-hating individual opened fire at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, reportedly killing as many as 11 people (the actual death count is unclear and may rise). The man, who has been named by multiple media sources as Robert Bowers, was captured by police and left behind a slew of social media pages raging with hatred toward globalists and Jews.

The individual is also a Trump hater and specifically talked about a “kike infestation” while also bashing Qanon. “For the record, I did not vote for [Trump] now have I owned, worn or even touched a maga hat,” says a post that is believed to belong to the shooter. …

This is a horrifying escalation of pre-election violence. We pray for all those impacted by these acts of violence and terrorism. https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-10-27-trump-hating-jew-hating-terrorist-murders-jewish-americans-at-saturday-synagogue-slaughter.html

The families of those affected are in my prayers.

The action of the shooter, like other terrorists, brings the following end time warning to mind:

1 But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: 2 For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, 4 traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, (2 Timothy 3:1-4).

Terroristic murderers are brutal. Many are boasters, proud, without self-control. Sadly, the synagogue murderer is only one of many in these times that fits many of the warnings in 2 Timothy 3.

Of course, hatred of Jews is not new. It has been a problem for millennia as the Book of Esther helps document.

But it has also been a problem perpetuated by Roman and Eastern Orthodox Catholic, as well as Protestant, leaders.

A Protestant author wrote the following:

Coming To Terms With History of Christian Antisemitism

27 June 2018

Does teaching Christians the thorny history of Christian persecution of Jews have the potential to change Christian-Jewish relations? Bob O’Dell, Christian co-founder of Root-Source, a web-based initiative that facilitates Israeli Jews teaching Christians worldwide, thinks so.

He told Breaking Israel News, “​If a large number of Christians were to become aware of the extent of the damage done to the Jews by their Christian forefathers, the relationship between [Jews and] Christians would have to change, because the basis for much conversation would change.”

While researching the Blood Moon phenomenon in 2013, O’Dell chanced upon historic details of the Christian persecution of Jews.

“I spent 25 years working daily with Israeli Jews, and visited Israel over 30 times, without ever knowing the massive extent of Jewish persecution by Christians. All I really knew about was the Crusades. I had no idea about Martin Luther’s role in the Holocaust, for instance, and I certainly didn’t know about the deplorable history of the church since the time of Constantine,” O’Dell wrote in a recent essay on the Root Source website.

Eventually, he accumulated a record of 500 specific incidents of Christian persecution of Jews throughout history; incidents that included pogroms, lynchings, riots, forcing Jews to wear special clothing, expelling Jews from a country, antisemitic writing from Church Fathers, burning synagogues with Jews trapped inside, forced conversions, accusing Jews of killing Christian children to use their blood to make matzah and the rape and murder of Jews.

This awareness shocked him. In his own words, “I was undone,” both by the violent history of Christians toward the Jewish people and also by the fact that he had never learned this history. https://www.breakingisraelnews.com/110062/coming-to-terms-with-history-of-christian-antisemitism/

While people who were referred to as “Christians” have committed atrocities and anti-Semitic persecutions, no real Christian would have done that (or at least would have repented if he/she sinned that way). Instead many who have claimed Christ have caused “the way of truth” to be blasphemed (2 Peter 2:2).

The Apostle Paul makes the following statement about real and not real Christians:

9 But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His. (Romans 8:9)

The antisemitic persecutors throughout history were NOT real Christians.

If we start with the pagan Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century (who is considered as an Eastern Orthodox saint), we note that he stated:

Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd; for we have received from our Saviour a different way. ( Eusebius’ Life of Constantine, Book III chapter 18)

The way that Jesus, who was Jewish, taught differently was love. Jesus never taught to have ‘nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd.’ Roman Catholics refer to Constantine as ‘Constantine the Great,’ but he obviously held anti-semitic views.

Around 332, Constantine issued what is known as the Edict Against the Heretics which included persecution against Christians who held to the original faith and had practices, such as the date of Passover, the same as the Jews (see also Persecutions by Church and State).

In 387, the Eastern Orthodox saint and bishop John Chrysostom preached the following:

The festivals of the pitiful and miserable Jews are soon to march upon us one after the other and in quick succession: the feast of Trumpets, the feast of Tabernacles, the fasts. There are many in our ranks who say they think as we do. Yet some of these are going to watch the festivals and others will join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts. I wish to drive this perverse custom from the Church right now…If the Jewish ceremonies are venerable and great, ours are lies…Does God hate their festivals and do you share in them? He did not say this or that festival, but all of them together. (John Chrysostom. Homily I Against the Jews I:5;VI:5;VII:2. Preached at Antioch, Syria in the Fall of 387 AD. Medieval Sourcebook: Saint John Chrysostom (c.347-407) : Eight Homilies Against the Jews. Fordham University. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.html 12/10/05).

John Chrysostom preached the following in his Homily Against the Jews (of which there are at least eight anti-Semitic homilies):

But do not be surprised that I called the Jews pitiable. They really are pitiable and miserable (I:II:1).

So the godlessness of the Jews and the pagans is on a par. But the Jews practice a deceit which is more dangerous (I:VI:4).

Do you see that demons dwell in their souls and that these demons are more dangerous than the ones of old? (I:VI:7).

Since it is against the Jews that I wish to draw up my battle line, let me extend my instruction further. Let me show that, by fasting now, the Jews dishonor the law and trample underfoot God’s commands because they are always doing everything contrary to his decrees. When God wished them to fast, they got fat and flabby (VI:IV:2).

Indeed, the fasting of the Jews, which is more disgraceful than any drunkenness, is over and gone (VIII:I:5).

John Chrysostom is considered to be a major Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox saint. He is one of the four ‘doctors of the church’ who is shown supporting a large black chair that is called the Cathedra Petri (Chair of Peter) in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The late Joseph Tkach of the old Worldwide Church of God once referred to this chair as Satan’s throne (see Might Satan’s throne be the ‘Cathedra Petri’?).

Let me add that when my wife and I visited the offices of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (the ‘first among equals’ for the Eastern Orthodox), there was a large painting of John Chrysostom on display.

The improperly named Protestant publication Christianity Today once had a link titled, “Person of the Week: John Chrysostom” which went to an article titled: John Chrysostom Early church’s greatest preacher. So, many Protestants too, endorse an anti-Semite. More on him can be found in the article John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople and Antisemite.

How Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant leaders can still honor John Chrysostom shows some of the depths of antisemitic hate that some in those groups hold to.

Perhaps it should also be pointed out that sometimes those in the true Church of God have been considered to be secretly Jews by some in Greco-Roman faiths:

In the Middle Ages, the Popes and the Councils were successful in destroying the Jewish revolutionary movements which appeared within Christianity in the form of false teaching and which were introduced by those who were Christians in appearance but Jews in secret. The latter then recruited upright and good Christians for the arising heretical movement by persuading the latter in a crafty way.

The secret Jews organised and controlled in secret manner the movements, which were the creative and driving force of wicked false teachings, such as those of the Iconoclasts, the Cathars, the Patarines, the Albigensians, the Hussites, the Alumbrados and others. (Pinay, Maurice. The Plot Against the Church, Part Four Chapter One. Translated from the German and Spanish editions of the same work. 1962)

The above book is still recommended by and for many Catholics (though some others distance themselves from it). Hence, some of the Greco-Romans have considered some of whom we in the Continuing Church of God include in our tracing of our spiritual ancestors (like some of the Cathars and Albigenses) to have been a secret Jewish group that only professed Christ. Of course that is false, otherwise, for example, we would not have produced literature such as Proof Jesus is the Messiah where we not only use scripture to prove Jesus is the Messiah, we challenge Jewish arguments against Jesus.

As far as Protestant leaders themselves with anti-Semitic views, one can notice some of the teachings of the famed Protestant reformer Martin Luther, who wrote in the 16th century:

My heart is fuller of these thoughts than my tongue can tell. I have come to the conclusion that the Jews will always curse and blaspheme God as all the prophets have predicted. He who neither reads nor understands this, as yet knows no theology, in my opinion. And so I presume the men of Cologne cannot understand the Scripture, because it is necessary that such things take place to fulfill prophecy. If they are trying to stop the Jews blaspheming, they are working to prove the Bible and God liars (“Martin Luther’s to George Spalatin,” from Luther’s Correspondence and Other Contemporan, Letters, trans. by P. Smith (1913), Vol. 1, pp. 28-29).

Furthermore he wrote:

I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that those miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews and who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them…They are so blind and stupid that they see neither the words found in Genesis 17 nor the whole of Scripture, which mightily and explicitly condemns this lie…They are real liars and bloodhounds who have not only continually perverted and falsified all of Scripture with their mendacious glosses from the beginning until the present day. Their heart’s most ardent sighing and yearning and hoping is set on the day on which they can deal with us Gentiles as they did with the Gentiles in Persia at the time of Esther…The worse a Jew is, the more arrogant he is, solely because he is a Jew — that is, a person descended from Abraham’s seed, circumcised, and under the law of Moses. David and other pious Jews were not as conceited as the present-day, incorrigible Jews…I wanted to present this to us Germans so that we might see what rascals the blind Jews are and how powerfully the truth of God in our midst stands with us and against them (Medieval Sourcebook: Martin Luther (1483-1546): On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543)

Martin Luther advised his followers:

…to burn down Jewish schools and synagogues, and to throw pitch and sulphur into the flames; to destroy their homes; to confiscate their ready money in gold and silver; to take from them their sacred books, even the whole Bible; and if that did not help matters, to hunt them of the country like mad dogs (Luther’s Works, vol. Xx, pp. 2230-2632 as quoted in Stoddard JL. Rebuilding a Lost Faith, 1922, p.99).

Accordingly, it must and dare not be considered a trifling matter but a most serious one to seek counsel against this and to save our souls from the Jews, that is, from the devil and from eternal death. My advice, as I said earlier, is: First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss in sulphur and pitch (Martin Luther (1483-1546): On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543 as quoted from Luther’s Works, Volume 47: The Christian in Society IV, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). pp 268­293).

Leaders esteemed by the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Protestants have all advocated horrible antisemitism. They were NOT real Christians.

Many people hate others, and the Jews tend to be one of the more hated groups. But that is not how people are to live.

Real Christians have always been on the side being persecuted and have never been on the side of the persecutors. And this will be true again in the future.

People should not be terrorists nor antisemitic. People should not hate others.

Sadly, many who claim Christ still hold anti-Semitic views, and some take direct anti-Semitic actions.

Sadly, we will see persecution greatly increase before Jesus returns (cf. Daniel 7:25; 11:30-35; see also Persecutions by Church and State)–this will affect Philadelphian Christians.

The underlying antisemitism throughout the world will allow for this, especially when the time comes when the Beast’s government mandates it (Revelation 13:15-17).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2018 at 7:30 am and is filed under Church History, Religious News.

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