By Loren Seibold
(July 6, 2004)
This story began to simmer on the national scene several years ago, to the satisfaction of some Christians and the embarrassment of others. It seems that a Texas rancher-cum-Pentecostal minister named Clyde Lott had set out to breed the perfect red heifer for the religious Jews of Palestine. And on July 1, 2002, aforesaid red heifer was born in Israel.
A heifer (for those who aren’t farmers) is a female bovine that has never had a calf. Red, in the cow spectrum, is sort of a rusty brown. The red heifer is spoken of in Numbers 19 as the only legitimate sacrifice for purification. The red heifer must be completely red, the rabbis say; even three black hairs or three white hairs render it unusable. This is extremely rare.
The importance of the red heifer is this: religious Jews want to rebuild the temple. But a good religious Jew can’t even step foot on the Temple Mount. First, because in his unpurified state he may defile the holy places by stepping on them unaware, since no one is absolutely sure where they are, and second, because the spot where the temple must be rebuilt is presently occupied by a Moslem shrine, the famous golden Dome of the Rock.
There is only one way a religious Jew (and please note that qualifier, for only a small fraction of Israelis are actually religious, but those who are tend to be fanatic believers) can go onto the Temple Mount, and that is if he is first ritually purified by the ashes of the sacrifice of a perfect red heifer.
Like a large number of Christians who believe in a prophetic scheme called dispensationalism, Lott believes that the end-time events can’t take place until all the Bible prophecies are fulfilled. In this prophetic scheme, all of the things God promised Israel in the Old Testament have to come true, because God doesn’t change his mind once he makes a promise. So the nation of Israel has to be reestablished (which happened more or less officially in 1948) and the temple has to be rebuilt.
Which brings us back to the need for the perfect red heifer.
In a region of the world where little things are not infrequently an excuse for a fight, when someone comes along and says he now has God’s permission to invade the Temple Mount, tear down one shrine, and put up another, Middle Easterners begin to tremble. We here in America are painfully aware of fanatical Muslims; what we don’t always realize is that there are equally angry religious Jews in Palestine who are not beyond provoking a world-destroying confrontation.
The Israeli paper Ha’aretz called this innocent calf a four-legged bomb with the power to start World War III. Let’s hope it doesn’t.
So what has this red heifer to do with Christian faith? It turns out that to many Christians today (such as Clyde Lott) quite a lot.
Through history, Christians have struggled to know what the right attitude is toward the chosen people through whom they received Jesus Christ. For many centuries an anti-Jewish theology was widely held and occasionally practiced, not just in Nazi Germany but in America, as well; not just among secular people, but in the name of Christianity. Henry Ford, that lionized Christian industrialist, wrote extensively against Jews. Hitler enlisted the support of the German churches in his pogroms.
On the other end of the spectrum, Clyde Lott’s view is a widely held one in Christianity right now. Dispensationalism is a complex end-time scenario, the best-known feature of which (because of the popular Left Behind series) is the secret rapture. But right in the middle of dispensationalist eschatology is the belief that because Israel was once God’s special people, God has not and cannot change his relationship with them. So before all is said and done Israel is again going to be front and center in the consummation of all things. God will redeem Israel in the end times and bring the Jewish people to salvation—according to some teachers, whether they like it or not!
This is why when any Israeli prime minister since Menachim Begin comes to the United States, he invariably meets with conservative Christian leaders. Bible-believing, conservative Christians contribute massive amounts of cash directly to Israeli Zionist groups. Normally peace loving Christians wait with anticipation on every bit of news from Israel, some even praying for strife to escalate. A few, like the Rev. Clyde Lott, add to the tension by supporting the aims of the most fanatical religious Jews, hoping to trigger the beginning of the time of the end.
(Continued)
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