title: “The Deed and the Docket: Weighing the Case Against the Prosecutors of the Jews” author: “Thomas Lee Abshier, ND” date: 2026-09-23 module: CFE secondary_modules: [CAP] type: essay status: FIRST_DRAFT topics: [abrahamic_covenant, genesis_15, romans_9_11, two_house_theology, judah_and_israel, supersessionism, zionism_and_anti_zionism, the_accuser, zechariah_3, title_versus_possession, leviticus_18, class_versus_person, christian_antisemitism, galatians_3_16, ezekiel_37] engages: “Scott Lively, ‘Satan’s Oldest Case File: Why the War on the Jews Precedes Zionism,’ September 2026. Summarized and paraphrased here; not reproduced.”

The Deed and the Docket: Weighing the Case Against the Prosecutors of the Jews

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 23 September 2026

For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. — Romans 11:29

Occasion. Scott Lively has published a short essay on why Satan hates the Jews, and why Christians who join in that hatred, under whatever banner, are doing the devil’s work. He writes as an attorney, and the whole piece is built on a legal picture: a deed, a grantor, a chain of title, a defendant who has not yet been called to trial, and a prosecutor who would rather try the defendant’s character than contest the deed on its merits. The essay is short, dense, and useful, and it touches a question this fellowship has already argued more than once: what is the standing of the Jewish people before God now, and what does that require of us? This essay summarizes Mr. Lively’s argument, grants what is sound in it, tests the framework he builds it on, and proposes a set of working rules for how a Christian should speak of Jews, of Israel, and of the state that bears that name.

I should say at the outset where I start. I hold with Paul that God has not cast away His people, that the natural branches remain beloved for the fathers’ sakes, and that the Gentile who boasts against them has forgotten who bears whom. On the essay’s central charge I therefore agree with Mr. Lively before he opens his mouth. My questions are about the machinery he uses to get there.

I. The Argument in Brief

Mr. Lively’s case runs in roughly seven moves.

First, the reframing. He says the Christian quarrel over Zionism is being fought on the wrong question. The question is not whether the Jews are good, but who holds title to the land, under what instrument, and who has the authority to cancel it. To argue about the character of a people when the issue is a deed is, he says, exactly what the accuser does.

Second, the deed. God gave the land to Abraham’s seed by a covenant in which God alone walked between the pieces (Genesis 15), and He restated it as an everlasting possession (Genesis 17). Because the Grantor bound Himself, no exile, no Roman decree, and no modern resolution can extinguish the grant.

Third, the motive of the accuser. Satan’s hatred of the Hebrews begins with the oath, not with the Cross or with 1948. The Hebrews carried the seed, the land, and the line of the Redeemer, so breaking that chain would break the plan. Pharaoh, Haman, and Herod are the same attack in different centuries. And because Christians have been grafted into the same tree, the accuser hates them for the same reason.

Fourth, the two houses. Jacob’s estate was divided: the scepter and the oracles to Judah, the birthright and the name Israel to Joseph’s line. After Solomon the two houses became two kingdoms. The north was divorced for idolatry, scattered, and lost its name; the south kept its identity and came to be called the Jews.

Fifth, the two files. The New Covenant was promised to both houses. The Church, he says, is the restored House of Israel, the prodigal brought home at the First Advent; Judah remains a separate file, partially hardened until the fullness of the Gentiles, and reserved for corporate recognition of Christ at the Second Advent. Supersessionism (the teaching that the Church has replaced Israel and inherited its promises) errs by merging the two files and stamping Judah’s closed. He calls his own position Two-House Millennialism: two houses, one king, one land, in the coming thousand-year reign.

Sixth, title is not a merit badge. Judah’s present possession is not a verdict on Judah’s present righteousness. Leviticus 18, with its warning that the land will expel those who defile it, remains on the books for the long run. Mr. Lively supports the Jewish claim under the Abrahamic deed while refusing to treat the modern state as the whole of the prophecy.

Seventh, class and person. God chose a people to exhibit, in its individuals, the best and the worst of humanity measured by His law. Scripture records both. To treat “the Jews” as a single moral corporation is a category error and the accuser’s oldest move: try the people, and you never have to beat the deed. Christians who indict the class over bankers, Gaza, the Talmud, or the revolutionaries of 1917 are prosecuting defendants God has not dismissed, and are using their own covenant standing to strike the branches that still carry the older instrument.

That is the case. It is a good one.

II. What the Essay Gets Right

The reframing is the heart of it, and it is correct. Almost every Christian argument about the Jews I have ever heard has been an argument about character. One side lists what Jews have contributed; the other side lists what Jews have done; and both sides act as if the ledger decides the covenant. Mr. Lively’s first question, who holds title and who can cancel it, moves the case to the only ground on which Scripture actually argues it. Paul’s own question in Romans 11:1 is not “Are the Jews good?” but “Hath God cast away his people?” and his answer is “God forbid.”

The reading of Genesis 15 is sound. In the ancient rite, the parties walked between the halves of the slaughtered animals to say, in effect, “so let it be done to me if I break this.” In Genesis 15 Abraham is asleep, and “a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp” pass between the pieces alone. God took the whole penalty of breach on Himself. Hebrews 6 makes the same point without the picture: God, “willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath,” so that “by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie,” we might have strong consolation. Mr. Lively’s phrase for the consequence is exact: if your gospel requires God to have broken that oath, you have put a defect on the title you claim to share.

Ownership and tenancy are distinguished correctly. This is the part of the essay most likely to be missed and most worth keeping. The deed is unconditional; the occupancy is not. “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (Leviticus 25:23). The same law that forbids alienating the land warns, “That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you” (Leviticus 18:28). Both are true at once. A tenant can be evicted for cause without the owner’s deed being cancelled, and the tenant can be brought back under the same deed. Every exile and every return in Israel’s history follows this pattern. It lets a Christian affirm the Jewish claim without pretending that the present possessor is beyond judgment, and it lets him say hard things about a government without touching the grant.

The class-and-person distinction is biblical, and it cuts in both directions. Scripture is the most unsparing record of Jewish sin ever written, and it was written by Jews. It is also the record of Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Mary, and the twelve. Paul, a Jew, says “they are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Romans 9:6), and in the same letter says of the same people, “beloved for the fathers’ sakes” (Romans 11:28). The man who makes “the Jews” a single moral unit, whether to damn them or to canonize them, has stopped reading the Bible’s own account. The Christian Zionist who will not hear a word against the Israeli government and the anti-Zionist who cannot say the word “Jew” without a sneer are making the same mistake from opposite ends.

The identification of the accuser’s method is the most important thing in the essay. Satan’s title in Revelation 12:10 is “the accuser of our brethren… which accused them before our God day and night.” His procedure is shown in Zechariah 3. Joshua the high priest, the head of the returned House of Judah, stands before the angel of the LORD “clothed with filthy garments,” and “Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.” The accuser’s case is the garments. They really are filthy. Judah had earned its exile. And the answer given is not a defense of the garments: “The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan; even the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?” The case is thrown out on the ground of election, and then the garments are changed. That is Mr. Lively’s whole argument in one chapter of Scripture. The prosecutor is answered not by proving the defendant clean but by naming who chose him. A Christian who stands at Satan’s right hand in that scene, adding to the list of stains, has taken a role Scripture has already assigned to someone else.

III. Testing the Two-House Framework

Here I have questions. None of them touches the conclusion. All of them touch the scaffolding, and I raise them because a sound conclusion resting on an overbuilt argument is easily knocked over by someone who only has to knock over the argument.

The estate was not split by Jacob’s two marriages. Mr. Lively writes that when Jacob married two wives, biblical inheritance law divided the estate between Leah’s house and Rachel’s. Scripture does not say this. The division it records is in 1 Chronicles 5:1–2: Reuben, the firstborn, forfeited the birthright by defiling his father’s bed, and it “was given unto the sons of Joseph,” while “Judah prevailed above his brethren, and of him came the chief ruler.” That is a division by disqualification and by God’s choice, not by the number of Jacob’s wives. And the division of the kingdom after Solomon is given its cause plainly: “Forasmuch as this is done of thee, and thou hast not kept my covenant… I will surely rend the kingdom from thee” (1 Kings 11:11), and to Rehoboam, “this thing is from me” (1 Kings 12:24). The two houses are real, and Scripture names them constantly. But they are the product of sin and judgment, not of a marriage settlement. The distinction matters because the law-of-inheritance reading makes the split sound like a permanent feature of the covenant, when the prophets treat it as a wound to be healed: “Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex Ephraim” (Isaiah 11:13).

The northern house was not entirely lost. The essay says the north “lost its name among the Gentiles,” and a great many did. But Scripture also records that before the Assyrian deportation, “out of all the tribes of Israel such as set their hearts to seek the LORD” came south to Judah (2 Chronicles 11:16), and that under Hezekiah “divers of Asher and Manasseh and of Zebulun humbled themselves, and came to Jerusalem” (2 Chronicles 30:11). When the exiles returned from Babylon they offered “twelve he goats, according to the number of the tribes of Israel” (Ezra 6:17). Anna the prophetess in the Temple “was of the tribe of Aser” (Luke 2:36), a northern tribe. James writes “to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad” (James 1:1), and Paul before Agrippa speaks of “our twelve tribes, instantly serving God day and night” (Acts 26:7). The people called “Jews” in the first century were, by Scripture’s own testimony, a remnant of all Israel gathered around Judah, not Judah alone. So the neat two-file picture, Judah in one and Israel in the other, does not quite match the census.

Paul does not use the files the way the essay does. This is the point I would press hardest. Mr. Lively says the Church is the restored House of Israel and that “Judah remains Judah,” partially hardened. But Paul never says Judah is hardened. He says “blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11:25–26). He calls himself “an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin” (Romans 11:1), and Benjamin was a southern tribe. Throughout Romans 9–11, “Israel” is Paul’s word for the unbelieving Jewish people of his day, the same people the essay wants to file under Judah. If we adopt Mr. Lively’s vocabulary we have to read Paul against his own usage, and the essay’s strongest chapter becomes its most awkward one.

The Gentiles are grafted in, not repatriated. The essay’s identification of the Church with the returned House of Israel has an honorable pedigree and a real text behind it. Hosea says that “in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God” (Hosea 1:10), and Paul quotes exactly this in Romans 9. But look at what Paul applies it to: those God has called “not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles” (Romans 9:24). Peter does the same in 1 Peter 2:10. The apostles read Hosea’s “not my people” as a pattern that reaches the Gentiles as Gentiles, not as a prophecy that the Gentile believer is secretly an Ephraimite coming home. Paul’s own picture for what happens to us is the olive tree: the Gentile is a wild branch “graffed in among them” (Romans 11:17), made a “fellowcitizen” of “the commonwealth of Israel” (Ephesians 2:12, 19), part of “one new man” (Ephesians 2:15). That is adoption into Israel, which the essay also affirms. It is not the same as being Israel’s lost northern half, and I think the essay would lose nothing by dropping the second claim and keeping the first. Ezekiel’s two sticks (Ezekiel 37:15–22) are joined “in mine hand” under “one king,” and that reunion is placed by the prophet in the coming kingdom, which is precisely where Mr. Lively’s own Two-House Millennialism puts it. The Church does not need to be that stick now in order to be an heir now.

Romans 7 is being asked to carry a load Paul did not put on it. The essay says that at the First Advent “the Husband died,” freeing the divorced wife Israel to be reconciled. This is a way of solving a real difficulty: Jeremiah 3:8 says God gave the northern kingdom “a bill of divorce,” and Deuteronomy 24:4 says a divorced wife who has married another may not return to her first husband. The two-house teachers answer that the Husband’s death dissolves the bar. It is an ingenious reading, but it is not what Romans 7 is about. Paul’s point there is that the law has dominion over a man only while he lives, and that the believer, having died with Christ, is released from the law’s claim. The one who dies in Paul’s picture is the believer, not the Husband. God, for His part, answers the divorce difficulty in His own voice, without a death: “I will betroth thee unto me for ever” (Hosea 2:19), and “Turn, O backsliding children, saith the LORD; for I am married unto you” (Jeremiah 3:14). The Lord who wrote Deuteronomy 24 is not bound by it as a stranger would be; He is the one who pardons. The essay’s conclusion stands on Hosea and Jeremiah. It does not need Romans 7.

A word on proportion. The essay says the Gentile world before Christ had no covenant court in which to appear. As a generalization about the nations it is fair; as a statement about God’s dealings it is too flat. Melchizedek, Job, Jethro, Rahab, Ruth, the widow of Zarephath, Nineveh under Jonah, and the Magi all show a God who was never without witness among the nations, “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them” (Romans 1:19). This does not weaken the essay’s point about why the accuser concentrated his fire on the Hebrews. It only keeps us from saying more than Scripture says.

IV. Galatians 3:16 and the Supersessionist’s Best Text

Any essay on this subject has to meet the strongest verse on the other side, and Mr. Lively touches it only glancingly. Paul writes: “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Galatians 3:16). And a few verses on: “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29). The supersessionist reads this and says the case is closed: the seed is Christ, the heirs are those in Christ, and the unbelieving Jew holds nothing.

The reply is that the same apostle wrote Romans 11 about the same people some years later and did not think he was contradicting himself. In Galatians Paul is answering the question, “Who inherits the blessing of Abraham, and on what terms?” and his answer is, “Christ, and those in Him, by faith and not by the works of the law.” In Romans he is answering a different question, “Has God finished with the Jewish people as a people?” and his answer is, “No; they are enemies as concerning the gospel for your sakes, and beloved as touching the election for the fathers’ sakes, because the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” The first answer tells us where the inheritance lives now. The second tells us that the people through whom it came still have a future that God has sworn to. Both are Paul; both are Scripture; and the reader who keeps only one of them has torn the letter in half. Mr. Lively’s distinction between the irrevocable grant and the temporary Mosaic statute, drawn from the same chapter of Galatians, is the right way to hold them together, and the essay would be stronger if it met Galatians 3:16 head-on rather than assuming the reader will not raise it.

V. The Prosecutor’s Job and Who Has Done It

Mr. Lively’s closing charge is that Christians who attack the Jews as a class are doing the accuser’s work. This deserves to be said plainly and with history behind it, because the Church has done that work for a very long time and has usually done it with a Bible open.

John Chrysostom, one of the greatest preachers the Church has produced, delivered a series of sermons against the Jews of Antioch in the fourth century that later centuries would quote for their own purposes. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 required Jews to wear distinguishing dress. Martin Luther, who wrote warmly of the Jews in 1523, wrote a treatise in 1543 whose counsel was to burn their synagogues and drive them from the land, and the Lutheran churches of our own century have had to disavow it in writing. The men who did these things were not pagans. They believed they were defending the honor of Christ against the people who rejected Him. That is exactly the prosecutor’s posture in Zechariah 3: the garments are filthy, therefore the defendant has no standing. And the fruit of that theology, when the Christian inheritance was later repurposed into racial theory, was the murder of six million while most of Christendom kept silent.

I say this not to indict the fathers but to make the essay’s point concrete. The road from “the Jews rejected Christ” to “therefore we may treat them as we like” has been walked before, by better men than us, and it ends in a place no Christian wants to be found. Paul saw it coming in the first generation: “Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee” (Romans 11:18). “Be not highminded, but fear: For if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not thee” (Romans 11:21).

In an earlier meeting of this fellowship I said that the only thing the enemies of the Jews across the centuries have in common is a conviction that there is something about this people that must be removed, and that the only explanation I can find for that is that there is something about this people that God very much likes. I still think that is right. Genesis 12:3 is not a slogan; it is a standing order: “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.” A man does not have to approve of everything done in Tel Aviv to fall under the first half of that sentence, and he does not have to be a Nazi to fall under the second.

VI. But May a Christian Criticize Israel?

The essay might be read as saying no, and I do not think Mr. Lively means that. He supports the land claim and explicitly declines to baptize the modern state as the whole of the prophecy. So the question is worth answering directly, because our fellowship has members who are uneasy with the present Israeli government and members who are uneasy with that unease.

The prophets criticized Israel and Judah more severely than any Gentile ever has. Nathan said to David, “Thou art the man.” Isaiah opened his book by calling Jerusalem’s rulers “rulers of Sodom.” Jesus wept over the city and pronounced its house desolate. So criticism of Jewish persons, rulers, and policies cannot be what Scripture forbids. What it forbids is shown by the difference between Nathan and Satan. Nathan named a man and an act, and his purpose was David’s repentance and restoration. Satan named a class and its garments, and his purpose was Joshua’s removal. The Law gives the standard for the first kind of speech: “Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour” (Leviticus 19:15). Righteous judgment is of persons and acts, without favor either way.

So the test for any statement about Israel or about Jews is not whether it is critical but whether it is a judgment of a neighbor or a prosecution of a class. “This action by this government was unjust, and here is why” is Nathan. “This is what Jews do” is the accuser. The same test applies in the other direction: “God has a purpose for this people” is Paul, and “Israel can do no wrong” is a different kind of respecting of persons, which the Law forbids just as firmly. I would add the standard I use for everything we say in the public square: would a Jewish neighbor, hearing it, feel that it came from a man who wished him well? Nathan’s words to David were hard, and David knew they came from a friend.

Leonard has raised in past meetings the question whether the leaders of the modern state represent biblical Israel in any covenantal sense. It is a fair question, and Mr. Lively’s own distinction answers most of it. The deed runs to the seed, not to a cabinet. A secular government’s possession of the land is a matter of God’s providence, not of that government’s merit, exactly as Cyrus’s decree was. A Christian can therefore hold the deed to be God’s, the present possession to be under His judgment as every possession has always been, and the government’s acts to be open to the same judgment any government’s acts are open to. None of those three positions requires the fourth, which is the only one Scripture actually forbids: that the people themselves have been dismissed from the case.

VII. Working Rules for Speaking of the Jews

Seven, for the fellowship to argue over.

1. Argue the deed, not the character. When the subject is the covenant or the land, the question is what God swore and to whom. A ledger of Jewish virtues or Jewish crimes is not evidence on that question in either direction.

2. Distinguish ownership from tenancy. God owns the land (Leviticus 25:23). He deeded it to Abraham’s seed for ever. He evicts and restores tenants according to their conduct (Leviticus 18:28). Affirm all three at once and the Zionist and the anti-Zionist both lose their favorite oversimplification.

3. Use Paul’s vocabulary. “Israel” in Romans 9–11 is the Jewish people; the Gentile believer is grafted into Israel’s tree and made a citizen of its commonwealth. Whatever we think about the ten tribes, we should not adopt a vocabulary that requires Paul to have meant something other than what he wrote.

4. Judge persons and acts, never the class. Nathan, not Satan. If a sentence cannot be rewritten with a name and a deed in it, it is probably a prosecution.

5. Bless, in the plain sense. Genesis 12:3 is not satisfied by a policy position. It is satisfied by wishing the Jewish neighbor well, praying for the peace of Jerusalem, and preaching Christ to Jews as Paul did, “to the Jew first.”

6. Remember whose garments were filthy. Every Gentile Christian was once “without Christ… having no hope, and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). The branch that boasts over the branch that was broken off has forgotten that it, too, stands by faith and not by nature.

7. Keep the two advents in order. Jesus came first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and said of Jerusalem, “Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord” (Matthew 23:39). The day when “they shall look upon me whom they have pierced” (Zechariah 12:10) is on God’s calendar, not ours. To curse the people He has reserved for that hour is, as Mr. Lively says, to take a knife to the timeline.

VIII. Conclusion

Mr. Lively has written a better essay than most of what is said on this subject from either side. He has moved the case to the right docket, identified the accuser’s method exactly, and drawn from Leviticus and Romans the two distinctions that make it possible to bless the Jewish people without flattering them and to judge Israel’s rulers without prosecuting Israel. On the charge he brings, that Christians who indict the Jews as a class are doing Satan’s work against defendants God has not dismissed, I find for the plaintiff.

The two-house machinery is another matter. Some of it is Scripture; some of it is a system laid over Scripture. The estate was divided by Reuben’s sin and God’s choice, not by Jacob’s marriages. The northern house was scattered but never entirely lost, and its remnant is among the people called Jews. Paul calls the hardened people “Israel,” not “Judah,” and calls the Gentile a grafted branch, not a returning tribe. Romans 7 is about the believer’s death to the law, not the Husband’s death to free a divorced wife. Every one of those corrections leaves the essay’s verdict standing, and I think the verdict is more secure without the scaffolding than with it, because an opponent who cannot beat Romans 11 can still beat a reading of Romans 7, and will be glad to change the subject.

What remains, when the scaffolding is set aside, is Zechariah 3. The high priest of Judah stands in filthy garments. The accuser has his list, and every item on it is true. And the LORD who chose Jerusalem rebukes him, calls the defendant a brand plucked from the fire, and orders the garments changed. That scene has not been reversed. Judah is still on the docket, and so are we, and the only safe place to stand in that courtroom is on the side of the One who chose.

I hold these conclusions as my best present judgment, and I would be glad to be shown a better argument on any of them.

Discussion Questions

Mr. Lively says the Zionism debate is fought on the wrong docket, character instead of title. Think of the last argument you heard or had about Israel. Which docket was it on? Would moving it have changed the outcome?
Genesis 15 has God alone passing between the pieces. What does it do to a person’s reading of Israel’s history, and of his own standing before God, to take seriously that God assumed the penalty of breach for a covenant only He could keep?
Leviticus 25:23 and 18:28 together give the ownership-and-tenancy distinction. Does that distinction let a Christian say everything he needs to say about the modern state of Israel? What, if anything, does it leave out?
Section III argues that Paul uses “Israel” for the Jewish people of his day and never says “Judah” is hardened. If that is right, what becomes of the claim that the Church is the restored House of Israel? Is anything of value lost by dropping it, and is anything gained?
Hosea 1:10 is applied by Paul to Gentiles (Romans 9:24–26) and by Peter to his readers (1 Peter 2:10). Read the three passages together. Are the apostles saying the Gentiles are the ten tribes, or that the ten tribes’ restoration is a pattern the Gentiles fall under? How would you tell the difference?
Galatians 3:16 says the seed is Christ. Romans 11:28 says the unbelieving Jews are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. State in one sentence how both are true.
Zechariah 3 shows Satan’s case against Joshua thrown out on the ground of election, not on the ground of clean garments. Have any of us argued for the Jews by trying to prove the garments clean? Have any of us argued against them by pointing at the stains? What does the chapter tell us to do instead?
Section VI proposes Nathan against Satan as the test for criticism: a name and an act, aimed at repentance, versus a class and its garments, aimed at removal. Apply the test to something you have said or read this year about Israel or about Jews. Which was it?
Genesis 12:3, “I will bless them that bless thee.” What does blessing the Jewish people look like in the life of a Gentile Christian in Montana who has no vote in Jerusalem and no Jewish neighbors he knows of? Is the verse satisfied by an opinion?

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee. — Psalm 122:6

— Thomas

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute Of one heart to make Christ King — 1 Chronicles 12:38

261009 – Satan’s Hatred of the Jews