On October 7, 2023, about 3,000 Hamas terrorists entered Israel from Gaza, killing 1195 people and committing hideous, evil, unspeakable acts of violence mostly against unarmed civilians. In the end, 828 civilians were killed, 36 of them children. Hamas also kidnapped 251 people including men, women, children, the elderly, and foreign nationals. Dozens of the people kidnapped were already dead when their bodies were taken into Gaza.
This was a coordinated, planned, military attack that first used thousands of rockets launched to overwhelm the Iron Dome air defense system and force Israeli soldiers into bunkers. Simultaneously, the terrorists used explosive-carrying drones and sniper fire to disable cellular towers, remote-control machine gun turrets, communication systems, and surveillance cameras along the border. Then, Hamas used explosives, tractors, and bulldozers to breach the fence between Israel and Gaza in roughly 30 to 60 locations. They came through on foot, in vehicles, and in motorized paragliders and ultralights.
I use the word “unspeakable” in that opening sentence very deliberately and intentionally because the things the terrorists did were specifically intended to humiliate, degrade, shock, horrify, and terrorize the people of Israel. They want these acts to live rent-free in the minds and hearts and souls of the Jewish people –and the people of the world – because that is what terrorism is. Terroism seeks to control people through fear and hate.
We know this was their intent because they recorded these hideous acts of violence on camera while gleefully murdering and mercilessly torturing harmless, defenseless, innocent people and broadcasting those acts for all the world to see.
That is why I will not speak those acts into my life, into yours, and certainly not here in the house of the LORD. I will not give the devil the satisfaction.
I’m not denying that those things happened, nor do I believe that we should forget them.
We, and the people of Israel, should most certainly not forget the faces and the names of the people killed in that attack.
The site of the Nova Music Festival where 378 defenseless young people were murdered at 6:30 in the morning is about three miles from the Gaza border. There are signs and photos commemorating each of those lives. Trees were planted in memory of each one.
All across Israel and the world, there have been and are memorials of those murdered on October 7, 2023.
Israel mourns and remembers her dead, but not all of Israel’s casualties are people.
As you know, I and a thousand other pastors travelled to Israel for a week under a trip made possible by a Christian ministry called the Friends of Zion and the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We were treated wonderfully. It is a trip I will never forget.
All one thousand of us prayed for Israel under a golden sunset from the Mount of Olives on October 7. We remembered and commemorated those who died. We praised God there because we know He is good, He is worthy, and He loves us.
But as that golden sunset stretched across all of Jerusalem before us and I wholeheartedly praised God for His goodness and greatness, I wondered what it would take for the people of Israel and the world to heal – to truly heal.
As Christians, we know we are commanded to forgive. We also know that true healing does not take place until forgiveness of some kind comes into the situation.
But when horrors and atrocities come into that situation, when the specific intent is to commit horrific, unspeakable, evil acts, how can anyone forgive that which is intended from its inception and very design to be unforgivable?
I said not all of Israel’s casualties are people, and by that I meant there was a piece of Israel’s heart that died that day and in the days following that horrific event.
As our guides took us throughout Israel, they told us that one of the core concepts of Israel is that people can all live together in peace in this place. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, secular, orthodox, ultra-orthodox, whatever – all are welcome to live here in peace and harmony.
October 7 broke the hearts of the Israeli people because it was undeniably and irrefutably evil.
I do not use that word lightly.
The Gaza Strip has been ruled by Hamas since 2007. Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States, the entire European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan, and of course, Israel. The 1988 Hamas charter proclaims that jihad against Jews is required until Judgement Day. Article 7 of the 1988 governing charter of Hamas "openly dedicate(s) Hamas to genocide against the Jewish people".
While Hamas has since removed the language above from its charter, it has been firing rockets into Israel from Gaza since 2001, targeting mostly civilians. It is well-documented that they use human shields, firing those rockets from civilian neighborhoods, storing them and other weapons and ammunition in civilian facilities like hospitals and schools, and that they had a vast network of terror tunnels beneath densely populated civilian neighborhoods. Members of the Hamas military do not wear uniforms when fighting or terrorizing their victims for the specific purpose of blending into the general population, which is a violation of international law. And Hamas publicly executes its own citizens who have been accused of various crimes against it, often without the due process of law. They have been condemned for this by other Palestinian groups, specifically the Palestinian Authority.
Of course, Hamas will and has denied all of the evidence against it, but they are among the extremist militant jihadists groups who believe deception, tactical dissimulation, and lying are acceptable or permissible tools when waging conflict or advancing their ideological goals against perceived enemies.
Our group visited Kibbutz Re-im, which (according to the internet) is a “secular cooperative community” located right next to the border with Gaza. It has a population of 479 people.
A kibbutz is designed as a commune with all the assets, tools, machinery, etc. of the kibbutz owned by the kibbutz rather than individuals. All of the income generated by the kibbutz goes into a common fund and is distributed to members as salary and wages according to their jobs. The members vote frequently on how the community is run. At its heart, the idea of a kibbutz is a more “pure” form of communism without all the poverty, world domination, dictators, and totalitarian politics normally associated with how that whole ideology has played out in world history.
The name “Re’im” means “friends” in Hebrew. The community consists of families living in houses whose members operated a dairy farm, a solar facility, and a precision laser metal-cutting factory.
The people of the kibbutz had made friends with residents of Gaza, and they visited frequently. It was discovered that those people, whom the residents of the kibbutz thought were their friends, had made drawings of the floor plans of their homes and given them to the terrorists so the terrorists would know how to most easily get in and kill them. The terrorists knew that the man who was in charge of security for the kibbutz was the only person with a gun, so they killed him first. The same people they thought were their friends came back and looted their homes after the killings were over.
The people of Re’im were harmless, virtually defenseless, and no threat at all to anyone. They didn’t just believe everyone could get along with each other in this country, they lived it.
They described their lives in the kibbutz as 95% heaven and 5% hell. On a day-to-day basis they lived lives in this beautiful, idealistic setting with flowers and trees and low stress jobs among a small community of friends and family. Love was real and all around them, except for the five percent of the time when they had to run to the bomb shelters and hide from the rockets Hamas was shooting at them… but it was very rare for anyone to suffer anything more than annoyance.
All three times I had previously been to Israel were during times when there were rockets being fired into Israel on a daily basis. It didn’t bother the Israelis because the IDF and the Iron Dome shot them all down.
The people of Israel had been told a butterfly couldn’t cross the fence protecting Israel from Gaza without the IDF knowing it. The legendary proficiency and capability of the IDF was why no one in that kibbutz, and almost all of Israel, did not and does not have personal firearms.
They believed they did not need them because the IDF could protect them.
But Hamas found a way.
Israel’s dream of an almost utopian society where everyone got along wasn’t just dragged through the mud on October 7, it was eviscerated before their very eyes.
And, despite all of the denials by Hamas and other liars around the world, the Jewish people knew their sons and their daughters, their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and friends were violently subjected to heinous acts of evil and murder and torture and worse solely and entirely because they were Jewish.
This was hate.
And it was hate the Jewish people have experienced many, many times before.
We visited the Vad Yashem Holocaust Museum as well. Hitler’s Nazi regime was merciless, cruel, and fueled by lies and hate.
Every genocide in human history has occurred when one group of people is somehow convinced that another group of people is not human or less than human.
And we Christians are not without blame either. We have a long history of persecuting and killing Jews because we blamed them for killing Jesus. The First Crusade, Medieval Pogroms and massacres, and the Spanish Inquisition are just a few examples.
It’s no wonder many Jews still do not trust us. Hitler pretended to be a Christian.
Hate breeds hate. Hurting people hurt other people and this situation is an escalating spiral designed to breed and grow hate.
And, let’s be clear here: The Jewish people are not the only victims in all of this.
Because Hamas used its own people as pawns in this game of hate, over 70,000 of them died before Hamas agreed to return the hostages and disarm. Israel agreed to withdraw from Gaza once the hostages were freed and Hamas disarmed. Hamas has returned the hostages, but now they refuse to give up their remaining weapons, so Israeli troops remain in Gaza.
According to research by Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, approximately two-thirds of Palestinians inside Gaza no longer support Hamas and about three-fourths no longer believe armed conflict is the way to achieve their goals – but Hamas (which has convinced less than two percent of the population to actually take up arms and actively fight against Israel) has not allowed elections to take place in Gaza for almost 20 years now,.
So, what’s the solution? How could we, as Christians, bring love and mercy and grace and forgiveness into this seething melee of hatred and demonic evil? What can we possibly do?
The first, as always, is to remember what God has told us, what Jesus has shown us.
When I think of all of that is going on here, the verse that still makes me want to weep and fall to my knees is Luke 23:34a:
And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
The first thing He said after they mocked Him and spit on Him and tore the flesh from His back with a whip and stripped Him and mercilessly tortured Him in front of everyone, and nailed Him to a cross was to beg the Father for their forgiveness!
No anger, no rage, no calling down angels or fire from heaven even though He could have – no, the most important thing on His tortured heart was forgiveness for the very people who were killing Him! The kind of love that would do that is hard to imagine.
If I put myself in that situation, the very last thing I could ever picture myself doing would NOT be asking for the forgiveness of the evil, heartless, inhuman, demonic treatment I was receiving.
Could any of us?
In that situation, forgiveness would have been the hardest thing in the world for any of us, but that’s the example our LORD and Savior left us.
And, as I talked this over with the other pastors on the trip, I came to the realization that the wounds Israel suffered over three years ago are still too fresh and too deep to even begin to talk to them about forgiveness.
Think of it like this: If a family came to you after their five year-old son had been run over by a drunk driver, would your very first words be about forgiving the driver?
No, the first thing we would do would be to love and comfort the family. We would want them to know they are not alone, that we care, that we are there to offer a shoulder to cry on, arms to hug, and ears to listen. We would cry with them, and we would pray for them.
And, we would know that there was no peace we could bring them, no forgiveness that could come out of our words no matter how many words we said - but God could.
The power of God’s love is infinite and beyond our ability to fully understand or experience, but I have experienced and been overcome by that very love. You and I can pray that the power of that love would overwhelm, cast out, and flood all the evil in this situation and replace it with the love of Jesus.
We can pray that the Holy Spirit would send dreams and visions of Jesus that are too powerful to forget or ignore to anyone and everyone anywhere who is an enemy of Israel whether they know it or not. We can ask that these dreams and visions would lead many, many, many people to seek Jesus and find Him, to be saved and have their lives changed forever.
We should do this knowing that there are more Muslims coming to Christ right now than at any other time in the 1500-year history of Islam. We should know that these prayers are working and many, many Muslims report having these dreams and visions.
And, we should know this one very important thing: When Muslims accept Jesus as their LORD and Savior, they stop killing Jews!
Now, you may have noticed that I did not ask you to pray for the conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity. While I am not against Jewish people being saved (!) and will even pray they also experience dreams and visions of Jesus, there’s a couple of reasons I focus my prayers on the enemies of Israel, and the first one is Romans 11:25:
“I want you to understand this mystery, dear brothers and sisters, so that you will not feel proud about yourselves. Some of the people of Israel have hard hearts, but this will last only until the full number of Gentiles comes to Christ.” (NLT, Emphasis added.)
That verse tells me that not only will the Jewish people be saved, but it will happen on God’s timeline. In the meantime, I should primarily be focusing my efforts on saving Gentiles. And, because I love the Jewish people, bringing their enemies to Christ and reconciling them to the Jewish people would bring the highest joy imaginable!
The second reason is Romans 11:11:
“Did God’s people stumble and fall beyond recovery? Of course not! They were disobedient, so God made salvation available to the Gentiles. But he wanted his own people to become jealous and claim it for themselves.” (NLT)
So, what better way to make the Jewish people jealous than to convert their enemies into allies and friends? That sounds like some pretty powerful evangelism to me!
The hardest thing in the world is a human heart filled with hate, but the love of God in Christ Jesus changes hearts of stone into hearts of flesh!
Here I am LORD, send me! HALLELUJAH!
(Side note. When I looked up Luke 23:38, there was a tiny note that this verse was not included in some early manuscripts, but it was included in other early manuscripts. When I did the research to find out why, I discovered some Christian scholars were against including it in the Bible because it left too much room for mercy for the Jewish people! Thank God He preserved what Luke wrote!)
Photo by the author. There is a funnel-shaped wall in Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel with the faces and names of people murdered in the Holocaust. It is suspended over a deep hole in the rock below it with an empty black hole at the bottom.
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