Israel's Modern Army and the Ancient Promise of Divine Protection
No nation in the modern world has lived under the threat of annihilation so continuously as the State of Israel. From the hour of its rebirth it has been surrounded by neighbors who declared, often in plain language, their intention to destroy it. Smaller than many American states, with a population that for decades could be counted in the low millions, it has faced coalitions of nations many times its size and has, against every reasonable expectation, survived and prevailed. The military analyst explains this by training, technology, and doctrine, and there is truth in that explanation. The Christian who reads the Scriptures sees something underneath it — the keeping of an ancient promise that the One who watches over Israel does not sleep.
Surrounded From the First Day
The Israel Defense Forces were formally established in May 1948, in the very week the state was declared and invaded. There was no time to build an army in peace; the army was assembled in the act of survival. A community of some six hundred and fifty thousand, lightly armed and encircled by the regular armies of five nations, was expected by the world’s strategists to be overrun within days. It was not. The young state held, and at terrible cost secured its existence. From that first war onward, a pattern emerged that has held for three quarters of a century: Israel does not fight for territory or empire; it fights, again and again, simply to continue to exist.
This is the essential context for understanding the Israeli military. It is not the instrument of an expansionist ambition. It is the shield of a people who have learned across two thousand years of exile and persecution that when they are defenseless, no one comes to save them. The memory of the Holocaust — of a Europe that watched six million Jews murdered — is woven into the very purpose of the modern Jewish state and its army. “Never again” is not a slogan in Israel. It is a defense doctrine.
Six Days in June
In June 1967, with the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan massed on its borders and Arab leaders openly promising to drive the Jews into the sea, Israel struck first and, in the space of six days, achieved one of the most decisive victories in modern military history. Outnumbered in men, tanks, and aircraft, the nation emerged not destroyed but enlarged — and for the first time since the Roman destruction, the whole of Jerusalem, including the Old City and the site of the Temple, was once again under Jewish sovereignty. Hardened soldiers wept at the Western Wall. Whatever one’s politics, the speed and completeness of that deliverance left even secular observers reaching for words like “miraculous.”
The Christian Zionist must be careful here, and honest. The Bible does not hand us a formula by which every Israeli military victory is a fulfilled prophecy and every setback a divine rebuke. To read events that way is to presume upon God. What Scripture does give us is a settled theme, repeated from the Law to the Prophets: that the God of Abraham has bound Himself to preserve the people of Israel, and that He will not allow them to be erased from the earth. The events of 1967 do not prove that theme. But they are remarkably consistent with it.
“Never again is not a slogan in Israel. It is a defense doctrine — and beneath it lies a promise older than the nation itself.”
Out of the Depths: 1973
If 1967 tempts the believer toward triumphalism, the war of 1973 is its sober corrective. On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, when much of the nation was at prayer and fasting, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack. In the opening days Israel reeled; its lines were nearly broken; its losses were grievous. Only after desperate fighting did the tide turn and the assault was thrown back. The lesson of 1973 is not that Israel is invincible. It is that survival is never automatic, that the cost is always real, and that confidence in chariots and horses — in tanks and aircraft — is never a substitute for dependence upon God. Israel learned in 1973 the same lesson the psalmist had recorded three thousand years before: that the salvation of the nation rests finally not in its army but in its God.
The Ancient Promise of Protection
Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures runs a thread of divine commitment to the preservation of Israel. The Lord promised through Zechariah that He Himself would be a wall of fire around Jerusalem and the glory in her midst. He declared through Isaiah that no weapon formed against His servant would prosper. He told a discouraged people through the prophets that though the mountains might depart and the hills be removed, His covenant of peace would not be removed from them. These are not promises that Israel will never suffer, never be attacked, never bleed. The history of the Jewish people forbids any such reading. They are promises that Israel will not be destroyed — that the covenant people will endure to the end of the age, because the One who made the promise endures.
Neither Slumber Nor Sleep
How then should the Christian regard Israel’s army? Not with the worship that belongs to God alone, and not with the naive assumption that every Israeli soldier is a saint and every decision of its government beyond question. Israel is a nation of men and women, and like every nation it is capable of error. But the believer who reads his Bible may regard the survival of the Jewish state, against all the odds of a hostile region and a hostile century, as one of the visible signs that the God of Abraham keeps His word. The same hand that brought the people back to the land has, thus far, preserved them in it.
The proper response is not boasting but gratitude, and not complacency but prayer. We are commanded to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. We are invited to stand with the people through whom the Scriptures, the Messiah, and our own salvation came to us. And we are given the quiet confidence of the psalmist, who looked at a small and vulnerable nation and declared that its true Keeper neither slumbers nor sleeps. The armies of men have their hour, and Israel’s soldiers have paid in blood for every year of the nation’s life. But the final security of Israel was never lodged in its weapons. It rests, as it always has, in the faithfulness of the God who called her into being and has promised never to let her go.