Gerald McGlothlin is a movie producer and a publicist. He is President of Moving Visions Entertainment, Inc., CleanTV and the publicity firm Special Guests, Inc.
Throughout the Tanakh, a painful pattern appears again and again: God blesses His people, they prosper, become comfortable, forget Him, compromise follows, and eventually judgment comes.
“Beware that you do not forget the LORD your God… lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them… then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God."- Deuteronomy 8:11-14
This “rinse and repeat" pattern plays like a skip in a vinyl record throughout Israel’s history. (Young people: Google what a skip in a record is.)
It appeared in the wilderness generation that witnessed God’s miracles yet longed for Egypt. It appeared throughout Judges, where rebellion is followed by oppression, repentance and deliverance, only for the cycle to begin again. It appears in the divided kingdom as kings and nations repeatedly move between faithfulness and rebellion.
Reading Jeremiah can almost make us want to warn Judah ourselves: Have you not learned from your history that you don’t learn from history?
But before Christians look at ancient Israel and shake our heads, we should examine ourselves. Are we repeating history too?
The Bible does not present Israel as a model of human perfection. It records failures honestly: idolatry, rebellion, injustice and unbelief. Yet it reveals something equally important: God’s faithfulness. Israel’s story is not only about falling away. It is about repentance, restoration and God keeping His promises.
God declares in Jeremiah 31 that only if the fixed order of creation disappears will Israel cease to be a nation before Him.
That truth should shape how Christians think about Israel today. Israel’s failures should not produce Christian arrogance. They should produce gratitude and humility.
Gratitude, because Gentile believers were grafted into the Jewish olive tree.
Humility, because we were grafted into the Jewish olive tree.
What part of “grafted in" do we not understand? A graft is not the tree. It is a branch taken from somewhere else and joined to a root it did not grow.
So who among us should be eager to cast stones at Israel or the Jewish people?
The Tanakh preserves Israel’s failures in remarkable detail. They record Abraham’s weaknesses, Jacob’s deception, Moses’ disobedience, David’s sin, Solomon’s idolatry and the repeated rebellion of Israel and Judah.
Yet Israel preserved that record themselves.
The Tanakh does not hide their ancestors’ failures or portray them as flawless heroes. They tell the truth about human sin while continually pointing toward the faithfulness of God.
Christians need that same humility today.
In recent years, influential conservative voices including Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have "reevaluated" America’s relationship with Israel. Legitimate criticism of Israeli leaders, government policies or military decisions is not automatically antisemitic. But Christians should be extremely cautious when political criticism crosses into contempt for Israel or the Jewish people.
We must not become so preoccupied with Israel’s failures that we forget our own.
The New Testament repeatedly exposes failures within the Church. Corinth struggled with division, immorality and pride. Galatia faced serious doctrinal error. Jesus warned churches in Revelation about abandoning their first love, becoming lukewarm and appearing alive while spiritually dying.
Christian history likewise contains extraordinary faithfulness alongside deeply troubling failures. Christians have served the poor, defended the vulnerable and sacrificed their lives for others. Christians have also participated in persecution, injustice, division and antisemitism.
The lesson is not that Israel should never be criticized. The lesson is that Christians should never criticize Israel from a position of spiritual superiority.
Israel’s history should therefore lead Christians toward humility, not pride. The same God who recorded Israel’s failures also preserved the Jewish people through thousands of years of conquest, exile, persecution and dispersion.
This does not mean every action taken by Israel or every decision made by its leaders must be defended. Nations can be judged. Governments can be criticized. Individuals can be held accountable.
But Christians must not confuse legitimate criticism with contempt, or political disagreement with the belief that God has abandoned the people through whom He gave the world His word.
Jeremiah’s warning was never merely about Israel. It was about the human heart.
Human beings tend to forget God when life becomes comfortable. Israel experienced it. Christians experience it. Nations experience it. Churches experience it. Individual believers experience it. Famous movie stars, rock stars and superstar athletes sometimes experience it on steroids, moving beyond comfort into entitlement.
Prosperity may be one of our greatest spiritual tests. It is easy to seek God during crisis. It can be much harder to remain faithful when everything seems to be going well.
That is why Jeremiah’s message still speaks today: Do not wait for Babylon.
Do not wait until everything falls apart before returning to God. Do not spend so much energy identifying someone else’s failures that you become blind to your own.
Second Chronicles gives the remedy:
“If My people who are called by My name humble themselves, and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven…"- 2 Chronicles 7:14
In the Sermon on the Mount, the warning was against hypocritical judgment: first remove the beam from your own eye, then you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s.
Israel’s story reveals both the seriousness of human rebellion and the greatness of God’s faithfulness. Christians can tell the truth about Israel’s failures, but we must also tell the truth about our own.
The ultimate Biblical lesson is not that one group of sinners is better than another. It is that God remains faithful even when human beings are not.
The question facing every generation is the same:
Will we remember God while the sun is still shining?
If not, Babylon may be closer than we think.