Why should Christians care about the conflict between Israel and Palestine? Why is there such a gap between Gen Z and other generations on viewing the conflict? Is Israel committing a just war, or is it genocide? In this episode, Sean and Scott address these questions, and more, with Dr. Jeff Myers, author of the new book Should Christians Support Israel?


Jeff Myers, Ph.D. is the president of Summit Ministries, which has trained hundreds of thousands of young leaders to embrace God's truth and champion a biblical worldview. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Denver and is the author of 18 books including Understanding the Times.



Episode Transcript

Sean: Should Christians support Israel? How can a biblical worldview help us think about the current conflict in Palestine? And how does Gen Z uniquely view this conflict compared with other generations? These are some of the questions we're going to explore today with our guest, Dr. Jeff Meyers, author of the new book, Should Christians Support Israel? I'm Sean McDowell.

Scott: I'm your co-host, Scott Rae.

Sean: And this is the Think Biblically podcast from Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Jeff, it's great to have you back on a new topic. Last time we talked about Gen Z. Now we're going to focus on how they think about the conflict in Palestine right now. But this book is framed by a trip that you took recently to Israel after the tragic terrorist attacks by Hamas on October 7th. Tell us a little about that trip and how it framed your view of the conflict.

Jeff: Hey, Sean, hey, Scott. Thanks for the opportunity to be on the show today. My travel to Israel during the time of war, to the war zone, was framed by a poll that I saw in November after the October 7th terrorist attacks. And I know there's a lot happening in the news, but, you'll remember, 1,200 Israeli civilians—men, women, and children—slaughtered, raped, mutilated, 250 hostages taken. That would be the equivalent of terrorists coming across the border into Southern California and murdering and raping and mutilating 42,000 people and taking 12,000 hostages, just for comparison's sake. Now, I saw this poll and it was done by Mark Penn, Harvard University, and they said, “60% of young adults say they think those Hamas attacks were justified because of Palestinian grievances.” The question was phrased just like that. I'm not…this is no hyperbole. They believe that those attacks were justified. And I realized, we've got a huge culture gap here, and it's not between Democrats and Republicans. It's not between religious people and secular people. It is between older generations and younger generations. So I wrote an opinion editorial piece for Daily Wire. I called it, "Congratulations America, you've Raised a Generation of Terrorist Sympathizers." And that got a little bit of attention.

Sean: [laughs]

Jeff: But it led to the opportunity to go to the land. And you've been to Israel, so you know that you go to Tel Aviv. They have a lot of security, of course, but the place is packed. No, it was completely empty. I mean, the security procedures in JFK were extraordinary. And I got into the airport, there's nobody there. And everybody kept asking me, "Why are you here? Why are you here? Don't you know we’re at war?" And so I finally said, "I'm here to show solidarity." And the passport agent just stamped the passport and shoved it back across and said, "Solidarity with whom?" And you realize there is so much tension going on in this place. From Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the streets were empty—I'd never experienced that before. And then down to the war zone. And you know you're getting there for a couple of reasons. First of all, the road becomes rough, because it's now chewed up by tank treads. And then, I'm traveling south, so I'm looking off to the right. I can see smoke arising from terrorist hideouts that have been targeted in Gaza. And then on the left, I hear the artillery. So I'm literally right in the middle of it with this small group that I'm participating in this with. And the entire trip was just to find facts, to gather information, to discover what is really going on that we aren't hearing about in the news, and that a lot of people aren't even hearing about at church. So I talked with everybody I could find. I talked with Palestinians and Israelis. I talked with Arabs and with Jews, with secular Jews, with religious Jews, with people on the right, people on the left, intelligence officers, IDF, everybody in between, so that I could get a perspective, and come back and try to communicate what's happening in the U.S. And it turned into a book. I know you guys are both authors. Something doesn't just happen into a book. Well, it did in this situation. I was writing out all my notes for the media and realized, no, this needs to be told in a larger way. And that is the story behind this book, Should Christians Support Israel?

Scott: So, Jeff, let's go into a little bit more detail about what you saw in Israel that is not being communicated back to folks here in the U.S. and maybe in Europe. What are some of the things that the media here is missing that we need to fill in?

Jeff: Man, Scott, there's so much here. Let me just mention a couple of things. The first thing is that the Israelis are conducting this as a just war. Now, in the group that I went with—just a handful of people. One of the guys in the group, his son, who had grown up in Christian school, Christian high school, Christian college, said to his dad, "Why are you supporting genocide?" By just going on the trip. "Why are you supporting genocide?" And when I arrived there, I realized that this is propaganda that people have been given here. In fact, John Spencer, who's America's leading expert on protecting non-combatants in a time of war, says that Israel has done more than any other nation in history, including the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, to protect non-combatants. They bind themselves to extraordinarily strict rules of engagement. Now, in a time of war, civilians die. The history of humanity is the history of war. Will Durant said out of the 3,000 years of history that he studied, only 268 years had been completely at peace. So 92 some percent of all of history is a history of war. Christians have thought about this a lot. Aquinas and Augustine, these two dominant Christian philosophers, both said, "Look, war is evil. War is always evil, but it's possible for just outcomes to result. It depends on how you conduct the war. Do you have a legitimate government with a just cause and right intent pursuing the war aims with proportionality and discretion?" And that became obvious that that's what's going on. In fact, I was with some IDF soldiers and I said, "Okay, tell me a little bit about what's going on when you go into Gaza, because you're engaged in street fighting, hand-to-hand fighting, essentially." And they said, "Well, we just, we try to protect ourselves." I said, "But how do you know who the terrorists are?" Because there are a lot of people there. They said, "Well, the terrorists are the ones that shoot at us." And I realized, "Well, you have to wait until they shoot at you to shoot back?" “Yeah, yeah, that's what we do.” Now, these are not necessarily trained professional soldiers. These are not Navy SEALs. These are everyday Israelis who did their military service, and now, in their 30s and 40s, are coming back to the war zone to protect their nation because they're now fighting on seven different fronts. So that was the first thing that really startled me. In fact, here's what we've learned, that in a time of war, typically in an urban warfare situation, nine non-combatants are killed for every combatant killed. Nine. In this particular war, it's about one non-combatant killed for every combatant killed. So, that gives you a sense of, Israel's doing something that is extraordinarily disciplined that most militaries never do, that is just not in the news. I haven't seen a single article about just war. I've seen a lot of things about genocide, a lot of questions about proportionality, but nothing about that. And the second thing was the steps that the Israelis were taking to provide for the needs of people in Gaza. I don't know if you've been to Gaza. It's not big. It's a 25-mile-long stretch of Mediterranean coastline, about seven miles wide at its widest point. This was a disputed territory for decades between Egypt and Israel. Israel left the region completely in 2005. And in 2006, a group called Hamas won an election there. Hamas stands for Islamic Resistance Movement in Arabic. And the United States has classified it as a terrorist group because of the tactics that it uses and because it uses its position of political power to raise an army, not to defend or protect the people that rules, the Gazans, but to bring about the annihilation of the state of Israel as its stated charter demands that it does. But I was thinking, well, how do they get food and water? My questions were really basic. “They get water because we have two water lines running into the territory.” “Really? And you haven't cut it off?” “No, no. We've always provided water to them. We desalinate it and then we send it to them.” I said, “Well, how are they getting food? Because we're always hearing that you guys have cut off all the aid trucks.” And this was back in January, and they gave me the figure. The figure now is 500,000 tons of food aid that the Israelis have brought into Gaza. 500,000 tons. That is enough to meet the food needs of 50% of the Gazan population. I said, “Well, but you've destroyed all of their agriculture and all of that, right? I mean, that's what people do in a war. That's what they did to you guys.” The Hamas terrorists destroyed 70% of Israel's agricultural production. They said, “No, we haven't. Some of it burned up, but 75% of it is intact.” I said, “Wait a second. So you're telling me—I'm hearing all of these stories about Gazans starving, and you're telling me that they have 125% of their food needs met. Why are they starving?” And then they just looked at me like, you still don't get it, do you? This Hamas group does not care if every single Gazan dies. They only want the annihilation of the state of Israel. And so I came back and realized three things had not been communicated in America, and one of them specifically for Christians. The first one is that Israel is a legitimate nation that has a right to defend itself. Second, that Hamas is the enemy here. People keep saying things about Israel, trying to put Israel in a bad light, but Hamas, this terrorist group, is an apocalyptic rape and death cult. It is the enemy of the Palestinian people and the enemy of Israel, and it needs to no longer be able to field a military or form a government. And the third thing is that God's not done with the Jewish people. While I was there, we sat down with an intelligence officer and the person who was arranging the meetings for us said, “We really are glad that you guys are here.” And again, it's just a small handful of us. “We're really glad you guys are here.” I said, “Well, why? I mean, why are you saying that?” They said, “Because you're the first Christians who have come over to actually ask questions and try to figure…you're the first Christian group that we've had.” And it stunned me, because Christians go to Israel all the time. Millions of Christians every single year go to Israel. But obviously in wartime, nobody was going to find out what was really taking place on the ground and provide, I think, a helpful corrective to some of the impressions that Americans have been given.

Sean: Jeff, that's really helpful to get the perspective on the ground, seeing it with your own eyes, you know, not too long after this conflict broke out. Did you have a chance to meet with Palestinian Christians or Palestinians who are not Christians, hear their perspective?

Jeff: I had the opportunity to meet with Palestinians who were, they were not Christians. They were Muslims. There are almost no Palestinian Christians in Gaza. In fact, the intelligence officer I worked with said there are 991 out of a population of 2.5 million people. And we know where they are. We're watching out for them. But they were not available to be talked with. But a meeting with the Palestinians and with Arab Israeli citizens, both…there was a tremendous amount of tension in those conversations because on the one hand, they know Hamas is evil. They know that if Israel was not sitting in the middle between the West Bank and Gaza, that Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank would be at civil war with one another. There's kind of the story out there that the Palestinian people are all one people, that they are an identifiable people group. But it's not quite that simple. It's very tribal. And each tribe is at war with each other tribe for dominance to determine who gets to represent the Palestinian people. But here's what I found. The Palestinians, even in the West Bank, they were in favor of Hamas. And I have found that this is true since that time too. In fact, I was visiting with a Palestinian Muslim here in the States. And I spent an hour with him. And I asked him, "What do you think about what's going on there?" He said, "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "Well, what do you think of Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank?" He said, "Oh, that man is trash." I said, "Well, what do you think about Yahya Sinwar, who's now the leader of Hamas?" He was the mastermind behind the October 7th attacks. He said, "Very intelligent man." I said, "I know a lot of people who've talked with Yahya Sinwar, and he is a very cruel man." He said, "Oh, yeah, good point." Like, that was the extent of the thinking. They know that the Palestinian authority is corrupt, that it has betrayed the Palestinian people over and over again, to the point where, in the hearts of the people, they now think it would be better if they were ruled by this group. They know it’s a terrorist group, they know it uses terrorist tactics, they know it does not allow free speech, does not allow freedom of press, brutally suppresses all descent. Don't take my word for it. This is what Amnesty International and the Human Rights Campaign have said. Neither of those groups, I think it's fair to say, is a friend of Israel. They're pro-Palestinian, if anything. Those conversations were quite awkward. A lot of frustration with Israel. Let me say this to you, guys, because a lot of people didn't know this. There was a lot of frustration inside of Israel with their leadership. They felt that they had been betrayed and not well-protected by their own government. We think that we have political division in this country. They have 55 political parties in Israel.

Sean and Scott: [laugh]

Jeff: Fifteen of them hold seats in the Knesset, which is their parliament. The majority party, the one that has more seats than anybody else, this is Likud. This is the party of Benjamin Netanyahu. They only hold 32 seats out of 120. Even they are an extreme minority. They debate and fight about things all of the time. The one thing they can agree on is, we're fighting wars on seven different fronts. We have to stick together. And so, they fight fiercely when they are attacked. But as I said, I think they're doing it according to just war principles, as best I understand them. And I know that's a huge controversy. I had a podcast about that yesterday, and it raised the ire of a lot of people.

Scott: Jeff, let me pursue that a little bit further. You have a specific chapter in the book on the just war criteria. What I'm familiar with with those criteria is that there's two parts to it. One is what's called in Latin, "jus ad bellum," which is justice in the decision to go to war, which you address specifically in that chapter. But there's also the criteria that's called "jus in bello," which is justice in the conduct of war, which I didn't see particularly addressed in that chapter. I'm curious…even if you concede that the numbers of innocent Palestinians who have been killed is inflated, I'll concede that. There's still a lot of collateral damage that's come from the way Israel has pursued this. I get that it's helpful to recognize that the ALDA has come in, but there's a lot of the Gaza Strip that has been reduced to, basically, a parking lot. Where is the place for sympathy and compassion for the Palestinians? Israel, I think, has made it clear our war is not with the Palestinians, it's with Hamas. But there are lots of innocent Palestinians who've had their lives turned completely upside down, if not had loved ones and family members killed, as a result of Israel trying to do away with Hamas. How would you respond to that?

Jeff: There's no question that's true, Scott, that their lives have been turned upside down. I did address justice in the context of war in the second part of that chapter on just war through three different things. That conduct in war is just if it, first of all, is based on military necessity, second of all, if it's based on proportionality, and third of all, if it's based on distinction or discretion. Each one of those is really important to talk about. It's very difficult to do this, because as I'm trying to think about how to describe this philosophically, I have pictures in my mind of destroyed buildings and of grieving families. It is the case that possibly 20% of Gaza is uninhabitable, their neighborhoods. People had always described it as an open air prison camp, so they didn't expect to see much when they saw pictures. But there were functioning cities there, high rise buildings, stores, you could buy products, grocery stores, things like that. It wasn't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, it was quite poor, but it was wealthier than 140 of the world's nations. So, that was the situation before the war. How do these three principles of justice in war apply in this situation? Well, the first one is military necessity. A lot of people have said everything Israel does is a war crime. You have to keep in mind that's because they believe Israel does not legitimately exist as a nation. That's the very first criteria. If it doesn't legitimately exist, it can't legitimately conduct war. Everything it does is, by definition, a war crime. If we set that aside for a minute and say, "Okay, let's start with the idea that Israel legitimately exists as a nation and its declaration of war was legitimate." What is military necessity? Military necessity says that, when you go into a war, you are responsible to protect non-combatants. You are also simultaneously responsible to protect the lives of your troops. You have a stewardship responsibility. You may not, for example, say, "Oh, well, the Palestinians want to fight. They're going to run into the tunnel at one end, and so, we have to send in guys one at a time to run in the tunnel at the other end and just see who wins, because that's the best way to do it." No, that's not ethical. It's immoral to do that if you have the means to drop a bomb and collapse the tunnel. The second thing is proportionality. Proportionality is not based on the number of bodies because…I don't know how to say this. We sometimes think that proportionality would be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, right? Lex talionis, we all learned that in the Old Testament. If they kill one of our guys, then we can go over there and kill one of their guys. What people expected to have happen is, they slaughtered 1,200 Israelis, and the Israelis go across the border and they slaughter, rape, and mutilate 1,200 Gazans, and then everybody's even. But that is not how a war works, Scott. When we experienced the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC and on Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, maybe 3,000 people died in that. That was an attack. It was a declaration of war. We had to find the enemy. It wasn't a state. It was this amorphous group called Al-Qaeda. How do you go battle against them? America decided, for better or for worse, how to pursue that. But no one expected that we would send all of our armies over, pick out 1,200 innocent civilians of theirs, and kill them. That's just not how you conduct a war. Proportionality is based on the potential threat that the enemy represents. Hamas has represented a threat. They continue to represent a threat. Their leaders have said, "We will do October 7th a thousand times." Do they have the means to do it? Apparently, they do. They have the backing of Iran, which is an extraordinarily wealthy oil nation that has an apocalyptic vision that demands the annihilation of the state of Israel and the killing of Jews. They have all of that. Even before October 7th, they had shot 30,000 missiles into Israel. The provoking went on for years and years and years, and Israel's response was always limited. They sent suicide bombers in. 770 people in Israel killed in suicide bombings by Hamas. Finally, Israel said, "This is enough. This is enough. The time to just say an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, is over. As long as this group, Hamas, exists, they will always be oppressing and killing their own people and using them as human shields. They will always be attacking Israel. This is the time to go to war and finish it." They weren't trying to even kill everybody in Hamas. They just said, "We want to end their ability to have a military and to field a government." That's proportionality. Then the third one is distinction or discretion. You primarily have to try to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. I will say that's much harder to do than people think, because the combatants in the situation are not considered by Hamas to be combatants. You always hear these stories, "Oh, the Gaza Health Ministry does not distinguish between combatants and noncombatants." Why not? Because they don't believe they have any combatants. They believe that if somebody runs down the street with a rifle trying to shoot at Israeli soldiers and that person is killed, they are an innocent civilian. They're not a combatant. They are a martyr. So, everybody's a martyr. The more martyrs, the better. That is the position of Khaled Mashal, who's the outside leader of Hamas, the guy who gained a net worth of $5 billion skimming off of international aid that was designated for destitute Gazans. There's a whole lot more there, but you’ve got to look at this with clear eyes and then try to figure out, what kind of information are we getting out of Gaza that is accurate? There are no reporters in there. I hope people understand. The only reporters who've ever been in there—and there are only a handful—are the ones who were embedded with either Hamas or with the IDF. All the others are stringers, people who live in that area who work for Hamas, who release to the world the information that Hamas once released.

Sean: Jeff, I know the focus of your book is on how Gen Zers are far more sympathetic to Hamas and have less support for Israel than other generations. The stats are pretty jarring in a sense, but I was having a conversation with a Gen Zer and he asked me a question that, to him, just seemed kind of black and white. He said, "So how can Israel specifically target areas in Gaza and Hamas, knowing distinctly that innocents such as children, are going to die as a result?" Now, I know Hamas, like you had mentioned in the book, will specifically hide as terrorists in hospitals and in schools, et cetera, but is it ever okay to attack with 100% certainty that children are going to die? He looked at me like I was crazy to think such a thing could ever be moral. I know that's common within Gen Zers, and that's at the heart of this book. What would you say to him in light of that question?

Jeff: The answer to that question, Sean, is the same as how we have to grapple with the issue of genocide. What is the intent? Is there a military intent there? We know that in war, every war that has ever happened, even wars…I would start by asking that young man, do you think that it was a good thing for the Allied forces to go after the Nazis? I'm assuming the young man would say yes, but you know that when those bombs are dropped on those ammunition factories in Germany, that there is going to be collateral damage. There are civilians working in those buildings. You know that. Is it still possible to have a just war? You have to go back to intent. What is the intent? Is the intent to kill those civilians? That was certainly Hamas's intent. They have not abided by anything even approaching a just war doctrine. They intentionally kill civilians. Their intent was to do that. I put the documentation in the book about that. Do we know that it's possible that people who are not combatants are going to die when combatants are targeted? Yes, we do. That is an unfortunate aspect of war. That has been an aspect of every single war that has ever been conducted. Do we have a just aim? Is this enemy genuinely evil and in need of being defeated? Is it possible that justice can arise from this even though we all know that war is evil? I think the answer is yes. Think about it this way. If someone, God forbid, were to break into the home of one of your friends and try to kill their family, and that person had a gun and shot back, is it possible that those bullets could go across into a neighbor's house and harm someone that's there? Yes. Is it still right for them to shoot those bullets to defend their family? In my opinion, it is. It is still right for them to do that. They are just in that kind of a response. If they say, "I'm going to shoot bullets around, and what I'm intending is that the bullets will go into the neighbor's house and hurt people," then that's not permitted. This is why in every given police action, they're trying to figure out, how do we go after the bad guy knowing that if there are innocent people around, they could get harmed? How do we protect them? You have to be able to do both at the same time, but the only way to distinguish what is really happening there is the question of intent.

Sean: Jeff, one more question for you. I think I've heard Scott say many times that one of the hardest ethical issues to deal with is on euthanasia. It's just so complex. There's no doubt with this conflict, it is up there in terms of how difficult and painful. I appreciate you lay out and tackle some of these tough questions in the book. Some of the other questions that I get asked are the right of Israel to the land, whether it's biblically or just historically. I was having a conversation with a young man and he was talking to me and he's going, "Wait a minute. There are Palestinians living in there before 1948 for generations as a family." In fact, just this week I heard a Palestinian Christian who went to a well-known evangelical school, not Biola, but one like Biola. He just kept referring to the land as his homeland because his family had been there going back for generations. Does Israel have the right to land? Do they not have the right? How do you make sense of that part of the conflict that's taking place today?

Jeff: Well, it is true that Palestinian people can trace their lineage back into that land. This is a complicated one. One thing you have to remember is that everybody who lived there was Palestinian, because it was called Palestine. It was named that by Emperor Hadrian after Jerusalem was destroyed. Only Israel had ever built a nation-state in that land. To this day, the only nation who's ever built a nation-state in that land was Israel. Jerusalem has only ever been the national capital of one country, and that is Israel. That's only ever been the case. But people were living in that land, and everybody there was called a Palestinian. Hadrian named it Palestine. In Arabic, it's Philistine. He named it after their worst enemies to shame them, and scattered them around the world. Everybody there was Palestinian. It wasn't a question whether you're Palestinian. You could be a Palestinian Jew, a Palestinian Christian, Palestinian Arab, Palestinian Muslim, Palestinian...everybody was Palestinian. It was a rhetorical battle that began in the 1900s, specifically around the time that Israel was reformed as a modern nation, where the Palestinian leaders said, "From this point forward, the word Palestinian will only refer to Arabs only. That way, we can distinguish ourselves from the Jews.” The Palestinians at the time Israel was formed were asked to form their own nation in Judea and Samaria, the better part of the land. They refused. They refused it in 1948. They refused it in 1967, 2000, 2008. Every time the Palestinians have been given the opportunity to say, "We are a people and we will form a nation," they've refused to do it, because they had only one aim. We don't want our own nation. We want all of it. We want Israel to not exist. We want the Jews to not be here at all. Well, the Jews’ claim to the land goes all the way back to Abraham, 3,500 years. So, I don't know. Are we just going to have a debate about who's been there longer? Because that's really the issue. Then, of course, people discuss, "Well, some of the Jews who have come back, they aren't Middle Eastern." But you have to understand the nature of God's covenant with the people. God's covenant with Abraham was with the people in the land. Every time the covenant is referenced in Scripture, it's with the people in the land. Christian theologians made this tougher because until 1948, the land did not exist as its own reconstituted nation. Of course theologians like John Calvin, Martin Luther, they treated Israel as a spiritual metaphor, because it didn't exist as a physical place at that time that they were writing. Since 1948, most theologians still are using theological categories that were in existence when Israel was only a spiritual metaphor, before it was reconstituted in its modern incarnation. Some people say, "Well, modern Israel has nothing to do with ancient Israel." Really? That's an opinion. That is not a fact. Modern Israel is a Jewish state. It's acknowledged as a Jewish state. There are 57 members of the Organization of Islamic States, one Jewish state. Their basic law is based on the Book of Deuteronomy, the Hebraic traditions going all the way back to ancient times. The things they do, marriage laws, all of those kinds of things, based on the Old Testament. Even the language, Hebrew, is recognizably the language of the ancient Hebrews. I think for all of those reasons, it's fair to say, based on God's covenant, based on the historical reality of the situation, and based on the nature of the Israeli state, that this is a reconstitution of the ancient nation of Israel. This is not to say, Sean and Scott, that all of the people there are righteous or that they love God. It's not true. Just like in our own country, there are a lot of people there who are secular. They don't have any particular religious beliefs at all, but it is the recipient of God's covenant, and that is consistent with what we know to be true geopolitically and historically.

Sean: I really appreciate that last qualifier. When you get to the end of the book, you said, "What can we do now?" And one of the things you said is, improve relations between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs. He said, "Israel doesn't invest in social services and community development among Israeli Arabs as it does among Israeli Jews." So, the case you're laying out is that Christians should support Israel, but that doesn't mean you cannot critique Israel and cannot have sympathy for those who are caught in the crosshairs. Scott and I are looking at each other, because we have literally dozens more questions we wish we could ask you about this.

Jeff: [laughs]

Sean: I think we just scratched the surface on each one of these. Literally, each one of these questions could be an episode in itself. But you lay this out. I appreciate that you went to Israel and saw this firsthand and talked to people, and your book, for 120 pages, just packs a punch. It's just researched so well. And the cool thing is, you told me before that you're giving this away for free. So, whether or not people are hearing this going, "I'm with you, Jeff," or they're saying, "I'm not convinced. I don't buy it," you're offering this for free so people can wrestle with your case. Tell us how people can get a copy of Should Christians Support Israel?

Jeff: This is published by Summit Ministries. If you just go to summit.org/israel, you can see the link there to get your copy of the book. And—I think your point is well taken—whether somebody agrees or disagrees is not the issue. We need to be informed and recognize that a lot of what we're seeing on TikTok, a lot of what we see in the news, isn't giving the full story. And you can get it in two hours and 120 pages. You might come away and say, "I still think that guy is full of it. I don't think he's on the right track here," which is fine. That's totally fine. I've had Q&As with a thousand students at Summit Ministries this summer. I've got another one coming up at noon today. Trust me, they always ask harder questions than anybody in the media has ever asked.

Sean: [laughs]

Jeff: You know how they are, Sean, right?

Sean: Yeah.

Jeff: They just lay it on you because they trust you, and they feel safe to ask the tough questions. So we'll be digging in. This is something that we need to have as an ongoing discussion, even if we can't see eye to eye on every issue.

Sean: Well, as you know, I spent a good amount of time this past summer at Summit, and it's one of my favorite places to speak at, to partner with you guys. You're trying to help people see all issues through a biblical worldview. And here at Talbot and Biola, especially on this podcast, our aim is to think biblically about everything. So I hope people will go to summit.org, pick up a copy, read it, discuss it, debate it, wrestle with it. A free resource is impossible to beat. But above all, appreciate your work, appreciate your friendship. Thanks for coming on, Jeff.

Jeff: Thank you, Sean, and thank you, Scott.

Sean: This has been an episode of the podcast Think Biblically, conversations on faith and culture. The Think Biblically podcast is brought to you by Talbot School of Theology at Biola University. We have programs in Southern California and online in spiritual formation, Christian apologetics. We now have online undergrad Bachelor’s in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics. We hope you'll check that out. To submit comments or ask questions, please email us at thinkbiblically@biola.edu. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please give us a rating on your podcast app and consider sharing it with a friend. Thank you for listening. We will see you Friday for our weekly Cultural Update. And in the meantime, remember, think biblically about everything.