A book about Turmoil...

Seeds of Turmoil. The Biblical Roots of the Inevitable Crisis in the Middle East, by Bryant Wright.

Disclaimer-I spent a Summer 2000 in Ramallah, teaching English in the refugee camps, worshiping in a small Palestinian Baptist church and playing basketball at the community center.

After requesting this book from Book Sneeze (where I get free books from Thomas Nelson publisher for reviewing them on my blog), I started to regret it and knew that it would just make me angry. But in some ways, I was pleasantly surprised; Wright gave a very balanced, fair report on how Arabs must feel about this injustice and their current plight in the Middle East. He also says that Christ came for all, Jew and Gentile, and that salvation is available to all through him.

But it wasn’t all great. The beginning of the book could have been called a very slow and repetitive walk through the Genesis story of Abraham and his family; which is where he gets the biblical basis for the current conflict. Then he gives three different perspectives and finished with three burning questions: Does God play favorites-Yes; Is God unfair-No; Is the Middle East conflict God’s fault?-No. I am glad he included these but for many it doesn’t clear up everything.

My (probably until eternity) remaining questions:

1. Okay Abraham sinned and messed stuff up but WHY did the consequence of Ishmael have to be thousands of years of conflict?

2. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day got what the Messiah was going to look like all wrong and rejected Christ. Is it possible that the current Evangelical thought about the modern secular nation-state of Israel being what God has planned for the end days be all wrong too?

I pray for peace and know that God had the most amazing plan for the Jews by bringing Jesus through them and still has a plan for them in the end. I would love to see a solution in the land but also know that it most likely won’t happen until Christ comes again. I know that Jesus said in Matthew that the end will come not after some political things happen but when the gospel of the kingdom is preached to all people. I, however unlike Wright, don’t get all warm and fuzzy about what a wonderful place Israel is and how going there makes you love Israelis, I guess it was because I didn’t have Jewish Holy Land tour guides there to meet my every evangelical need, instead I had to deal with check points and airport security and listen to the stories of people who still wear their house key around their neck even though it has been lived in by someone who stole it from them in 1948.

Overall the book is good for the easy to understand way he presented the Bible knowledge, the fair treatment of all perspectives, and the emphasis of Jesus’ salvation, but I don’t agree with the end thought of blindly supporting a state that often acts very ungodly.