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(cinciella, I'm pinging you because you were gracious enough to provide me that John McTernan link, and it has helped me greatly to understand what is going on these days in the neo-dispy camp. I'm trashing it here.)

Regardless of whatever interpretation of the end times someone has, if they don’t support Israel, God is NOT going to bless them.

I second that face-palm. We should be getting all kinds of blessing due to the heat we are taking from the Muslim world in our support of Israel, the billions we pour into Israel in the form of financial aid, and the military and intelligence protection that has ironically bankrupted our nation. Has anybody cared to ask where Israel got materials for The Bomb and for their missile defense system? When it comes to any friend in the world to Israel, what name first comes to mind? Why are there more Jews with American passports than with Israeli? Where is our blessing!! And why was the US winning wars and growing mightily in wealth and land prior to 1948, but since then we have been falling apart and can't even win a war anywhere?

Recently I was treated to a link to video of some joker name John McTernan who spoke for an hour at some 2009 Prophecy Conference. I was provided this link because I openly questioned why Dysfunctionalists keep linking natural disasters to this concept of "cursing Abraham". This video has now convinced me that Premillennial Dysfunctionalism as it is now practiced isn't your father's Dispensationalism, it is totally unhinged and quite frankly the whole presentation was from the pit of Hell. I had to read some DeMar books and listen to Riddlebarger for a couple hours to relieve me of the demons that poured out from that message.

I did write down some notes, and then I spent some time contemplating what deranged line of thinking is required to get to where John McTernan is. I think I have distilled it down to this primary error - Dysfunctionalists have bastardized Genesis 12:3 so much that it retains none of its original meaning and it now acts as the foundation of their WWGC (Who Would God Curse) jewelry set and their universal "Commerce Clause" to condemn anyone who doesn't have an obsessive Jew fetish.

Before coming out and trash this fundamental doctrine of the Dysfunctionalist, it I it responsible to reach back into time and read the commentary of it through the ages. From the early writers until well into the 19th century it was universally held to be a poetic way for God to say, "Abram, trust me when I ask you to leave your home country, I will take personally how you are treated and respond in kind." Then I started reading some commentary from the non-reformed of the 20th century and while some retained this opinion, I noticed that the gratuitous opinion that "this could be extended to the Jews" was carefully added into the commentary. Reading Dysfunctionalist commentary, they completely departed from the centuries old majority view and just claimed "This means Jews".

Furthermore, the "bless those who bless you, curse him who curses you" part was not repeated by God to Isaac yet all of the other promises were. When Isaac blessed Jacob, he personally added "bless those who bless you" but did not restore the "curse". This is further scriptural evidence that the "blessing/cursings" promise was only to Abram and was a reward for his faith.

I also noticed that modern paraphrases tend to deviate from the Hebrew and traditional English translations. When the "Bless those who Bless thee...curse the man who curses thee" line in the Hebrew ('curse' here comes in two different words), the modern translations convert the singular "the man" who curses to the plural "those" who curse. Modern Evangelicals are largely illiterate and disinterested in details, so this change from the singular to plural escapes notice yet is critical to Dysfunctionalist doctrine of the God who throws bolts of lightning down from heaven at nations when a leader "curses Abraham".

If the original words were kept, then the worst thing that could happen when Bill Clinton met with the Syrian leader in Geneva would not be the Northridge Earthquake that killed people unrelated to the Clintons as God's "curse", but would be that Bill Clinton himself would drop dead on the spot.

But even that would be an unBiblical view of curses, since God doesn't "curse" in any manner similar to what the Dysfunctionalist Tempests claim. When George H W Bush met with Arab leaders in Madrid to discuss Israel, John McTernan claimed that this "curse against Abraham" resulted in Bush's Kennebunkport being damaged by storm, and a dozen or people getting killed by the freak 1991 "Perfect Storm" that occured hours after his proclamation about Israel.

Later in the presentation he literally blamed Katrina on the actions of George W Bush because Bush somehow "cursed Abraham" by talking to the Palestinians about the fate of Israel.

When God releases His Wrath on a people, He gives them ample warnings - like the people of Ninevah received. They were told by a Prophet of God that they corporately were to repent or be corporately destroyed. Dittos with the Pharoahs of Egypt were sent Joseph then later Moses and Aaron and others, the Persian kings were sent Daniel, Edom was warned by Obadiah, Ezekile, Isaiah, Jeremiah and others warned the remaining nations that we read were judged.

This idea that Obama and Hillary are causing our financial depression because of how we treat Israel is even contrary to other Dysfunctional teachings that the US isn't mentioned in prophecy and that Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, Joel, Zechariah, Obadiah et al were not speaking of their contemporary nations under God's judgment, but were speaking exclusively TO today's nations. IOW, the prophets of millennia ago are our warning today, and none of their prophecies talk about negotiating with the Palestinians or our conduct in UN Security Council meetings. Furthermore, they keep telling us to take things literally, and none of the "curses" involved Gulf oil spills and hurricanes.

I'm still trying to figure out why the Balfour Declaration of 1917 resulted in the Flu Pandemic that killed tens if not hundreds of millions - which pestilences are common traditional "curses".

So the Dysfunctionalists have hijacked a passage, claimed that a personal promise to Abram is magically extended to a nation God has judged out of existence, that the actions of one person will decimate the innocent, that God now destroys nations capriciously without first sending a prophet and listing the charges, and He uses the stock market as evidence that "I am God". (Yes, John has claimed that since we haven't had a damaging year of natural disasters aka "Acts of God" we are now cursed by God with dramatic falling stock prices (something man actually does control)

Given the Scriptural, doctrinal, logical and empirical refutation to the claim "Curse those who curse you, and bless those who bless you" of Genesis 12:3 somehow is relevant to unnamed nations against a judged and dispersed people, I can't see any reason to pretend that there is this Raiders of the Lost Ark sort of Voo Doo that returns a "recognition of Palestinians" as a reason to destroy billions in personal property. But given that the Dysfunctionalists must get louder and shriller in order to stay in the news, the bookstores and be choice speakers on the lecture circuit, I can only imagine it getting even worse.