The Magnitude of the Story
This is not the post I planned to publish this week.
On Monday I sat down, intending to draft an adaptation of my Sunday message, Everything in Messiah, based on Ephesians 1. The heart of that message surrounded Paul’s concern that the non-Jewish believers in Ephesus did not understand the magnitude of the story they had been invited into. Paul commended their faith, but prayed for their eyes to be opened because he sensed they needed a deeper understanding of the Messiah they already loved.
That’s the message I shared Sunday, and its the blog post I intended to publish this week.
Then I checked my email and the point of my sermon landed hard, right in my inbox, in the words of a stranger I have never met.
When I published The Forgotten Gospel, I wrote it in English for ordinary American evangelicals. At best, I hoped it might find its way into a few churches and communities already interested in its themes. More realistically, I expected its readership to remain fairly small and regional.
I did not anticipate an international response or repeated requests for translation into other languages.
French. Arabic. Portuguese.
These emails never come as inquiries from people who would simply prefer to read the book in another language.
Each translation request has come from a believer or Christian leader confronting antisemitism and replacement theology in places where the pressure is far greater than most American evangelicals understand.
A reader in the United Kingdom with close ties to France told me about the dark environment in which Jewish communities across the Channel are now living. In 2025, France recorded 1,320 antisemitic acts. President Macron has publicly warned of an evolving “antisemitic hydra” emerging from Islamist, far-right, far-left, anti-Zionist, and digital sources. Other ministry leaders in France have also told me how deeply antisemitism runs there. Decades of social change and mass immigration have created an increasingly volatile environment in which Christian supersessionism now mixes with newer political, ideological, and Islamist expressions of the same ancient contempt.[1] This British reader believed the message of The Forgotten Gospel is urgently needed in France.
Next came two requests from Brazil. One reader explained how valuable a Portuguese translation could be throughout the global Lusophone community, especially in places where many believers face violence and limited access to theological resources. Centuries of Christian supersessionist influence—much of it carried into Portuguese-speaking cultures through Catholic teaching and tradition—have created a formidable theological wall. Official declarations by the Catholic Church may change institutional language, he observed, but cannot instantly undo beliefs and doctrines held across generations.
Most recently, I heard from an American pastor and missionary serving in Cairo. He, too, urged me to consider translation—this time into Arabic. Disciples of Jesus in Egypt are eager to learn and grow, he told me, but the roots of supersessionism and antisemitism run incredibly deep. Teaching against them sounds like an uphill battle. He has searched for Arabic resources he can safely recommend to his community, but some of the materials that already exist are too academic or carry serious risks. Placing them into the wrong hands could expose readers to government scrutiny.
These messages have come to me from different regions, languages, and church traditions, but the warning is the same.
The pressure to turn against the Jewish people is intensifying around the world, and many Christians have never been taught why their response to it is a matter of faithfulness to Jesus.
I am encouraged that some American Christians are beginning to ask important questions and take these things seriously. A few pastors from churches here in the US have also written to me about my book, and I’m delighted to hear how they are engaging these topics within their communities. Yet across much of American Christianity, rising antisemitism is still treated as a distant concern—something tragic, perhaps, but mostly unrelated to one’s everyday walk with God.
Christian leaders around the world are telling me otherwise.
The pressure is already bearing down on these communities. Globally, believers are theologically unprepared and under-resourced to withstand it, and these leaders are asking whether something written for English-speakers could somehow be translated into the languages of disciples facing much more immediate tests of faith.
The Pressure is Here
I have long feared the American church is no better prepared to face those same tests here at home.
Perhaps it’s comforting to tell ourselves that these challenges are confined to Europe, the Middle East, or another far away place.
They aren’t.
The same pressure is already building here inside our civic institutions, political movements, and even our churches. Recent protests and political campaigns here in the Midwest reveal a cultural shift: the collapse of moral consensus and the rise of a distinctly anti-biblical value system. (I wrote more about that here.)
Believers are deceived if we imagine ourselves insulated from what Christian leaders are confronting abroad. Standing against antisemitism does not require Christians to shun their Muslim neighbors. Holding to biblical values does not mandate allegiance to MAGA, Christian nationalism, or any political leader or party. Supporting Israel and the Jewish people does not require defending every decision made by the modern State of Israel or turning a blind eye to Palestinian suffering.
I have tried to make these distinctions clear at every turn and in every conversation. There are major concerns and difficult questions, and Christian leaders have a great deal of work to do in meeting people honestly and compassionately within them.
But we must not allow the complexity of these questions to obscure a much more basic observation: American Christians—and evangelicals in particular—are deeply deceived about the danger before us.
The Theology Beneath the Deception
Antisemitism, anti-Judaism, and anti-Zionism have found room to grow among people who confess faith in Jesus because supersessionism—the belief that Christianity supersedes Judaism—has already trained generations of Christians to regard anything Jewish with suspicion. (I wrote about that here.)
Once that theological foundation has been laid, the world’s growing hostility toward Jews can be rationalized as a sad reality, but ultimately something that’s unrelated to Christian faith. In many Christian minds, the question of Israel has been settled:
Traditional supersessionism says Israel has been replaced.
Progressive covenantalism says Israel has been absorbed.
Dispensationalism, in many of its popular expressions, says Israel has been temporarily aside (even if God does preserve a role for her later) [2].
These systems differ significantly, but all contribute to the same practical result: they do nothing to combat the rising tide of hostility and suspicion against anything Jewish and nothing to teach non-Jewish believers the staggering weight of the role God expects them to play in the Jewish story they have been invited into.
Antisemitism becomes a cultural issue rather than a discipleship issue. Anti-Zionism becomes a foreign-policy debate rather than a matter of fidelity to the Most High God. Anti-Judaism becomes someone else’s danger rather than a sobering test facing the people who have been grafted into God’s enduring promises.
That is the deception leaving Christians vulnerable.
Will We Recognize It?
Christians who can recognize antisemitism only when it erupts in physical violence or spewing slurs—but not when it comes clothed in Christian theology, humanitarian rhetoric, or religious devotion—are unprepared to navigate what is already unfolding around the world.
Christians who treat Zionism or anti-Zionism as political questions—without seriously studying what God has said about the land, people, and city he has called his own—are unprepared to reckon with the redemptive consequences of how this generation responds to these issues in our day.
Christians who recognize anti-Judaism only in the public defacement of a synagogue—but not in the church’s habit of diminishing the Jewish Scriptures and foundational wisdom we find in them—are unprepared to find their way through the tangles and historical scars this deception has left behind.
Faith in Jesus requires fidelity to the Jewish Messiah—the Son of David and Lion of Judah—and obedience to his teaching. It requires love and humble regard for the people to whom God entrusted the covenants, promises, worship, Scriptures, and the Messiah himself—and a refusal to become arrogant toward those things. And it requires the moral courage to test everything, hold fast to what is true, and recognize distortions of God’s word wherever they appear—whether from the politics, Islamist movements, secular institutions, cultural traditions, social pressure, or within the church itself.
The Kind of People We Must Become
The repeated requests for translations from global Christian leaders signal that this is not the time for American Christians to congratulate ourselves because we do not personally hate Jews, but to humbly ask whether our theology, loyalties, and understanding of Scripture are strong enough to withstand the pressure when identification with the Jewish story and its Messiah becomes socially costly.
If we ask that question honestly, I believe it will produce a particular kind of people.
People who study, now—who immerse themselves in the Scriptures and meditate on the Torah day and night, becoming so deeply rooted in the truth—and in why it is true—that they recognize a lie even when it comes robed in religious language.
People who pray, now—who offer bold, urgent prayers for the strengthening of believers already standing in places far more difficult and dangerous than our own circumstances.
People who give, now—who support those serving where the darkness is thicker, enabling them to teach, disciple, translate, and put trustworthy resources into the hands of believers in their own languages.
People who remain alert, now—who learn to recognize the ancient hatred of the serpent and stand against its modern and most sophisticated disguises.
A Strong Delusion
Paul warned the believers in Thessalonica not to be deceived. Even in his own day, he wrote, the secret power of “lawlessness”—Torahlessness, separation from God’s Torah—was already at work. Yet he foresaw a day when that rebellion against God’s wisdom and righteous standard would be fully revealed, empowered by the Adversary through counterfeit signs and “every sort of evil that deceives.”
Those who refused to love the truth—the truth revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures and embodied by the Messiah who came to uphold them—would be given over to a strong delusion.
They would believe the lie.
Delusions work gradually, tightening their grip and dimming the light until people call evil good and good evil. They blur the boundaries God has established, distorting his definitions of righteousness and justice. Eventually, they persuade people that their rebellion against God is an act of faithfulness to him.
In our day, that delusion is at work in many horrific and sinister ways.
Increasingly, I see it seeping into the American church, teaching Christians that its ok to disregard the people, land, and promises of God’s covenant while claiming fidelity to the one who cut it. It persuades believers that indifference is righteousness and the things at the center of God’s redemptive plan do not matter all that much in the end.
For American Christians, the conditions for this delusion are not somewhere on the distant horizon. They are in our culture, appearing on our ballots, and being delivered through Amazon in “Christ-centered” books.
An Ancient Prayer Answered
I could have published my message on Ephesians 1 today. Instead, I am telling you this story because I believe it’s the heart of Paul’s concern reaching into our own day.
Non-Jewish believers must come to understand the magnitude of what God is doing for them and for all the world through the Jewish people and her Messiah.
If the delusion were not real, pastors and ministry leaders I have never met would not be writing to me from across the world, asking whether an indy book—written by an unknown homeschool mom in rural Wisconsin—could somehow be translated into Arabic, Portuguese, or French.
But I don’t write this to condemn the church or discourage believers. That’s both the wrong posture and the wrong lesson. Even in the face of these warnings, I remain hopeful.
These leaders somehow found The Forgotten Gospel, and now they are reaching out from difficult places, burdened for believers under deepening pressures. That is a modern-day answer to Paul’s prayer: believers whose eyes are being opened to the magnitude of this story—and who are laboring alongside him 2,000 years later to open the eyes of others.
Today, I felt compelled to share that good news with you.
“I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe...”
I echo Paul in every word of his prayer today.
May God open our eyes.
May he give us the courage to strengthen those already standing on front lines of darkness.
May our faith become a blessing to them.
And when the pressure reaches our own doors, may we be found faithful too.
Notes
See Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West.
See Brianna Tittel, The Forgotten Gospel: Reimagining Leviticus and the Story of Jesus, Appendix: On Covenant, Continuity, and the Story of Leviticus