How to Bless Israel? Four Ways to Position for Success

As I stood on a hillside in Samaria, watching the clouds dance across the mountains and the sun begin to peep its head above the ridgeline, I thought about how faithful God’s covenantal lovingkindness is. These hills have swallowed empires. They have watched Babylon, Greece, Rome, and the Ottomans come and go. But through every single one of those empires, one thing never changed–God's eyes stayed fixed on this Land and People. “I am zealous for Zion with great zeal”–the  Creator of the Universe says in Zechariah 8–“with great fervor I am zealous for her.” That is not a passing sentiment. That is the heartbeat of God, and He has mercifully invited us to align our rhythms with His.

Our question today is, how? How do we, as non-Jews scattered across the nations, grab hold of that same zeal and turn it into something real in our lives? I have spent nearly two decades wrestling with this question. As I have walked the mountains of Israel, working this land with my own hands, God has been faithful to answer the desires of my heart. Today, I want to share that with you. It’s not an esoteric essay or a five-year plan. It is a practical, beautiful picture–arms open wide, lovingly reaching out to bless Israel.

H is for Humbly

Picture two thousand years stacked up like stones, one on top of the other, each one carved with an event that is etched deeper still into the minds of the Jewish people. The Crusades. The blood libels. The pogroms of Eastern Europe. The gas chambers where hymns were sung by the very people kindling the genocidal fires. 

Each of these stones form the wall standing between the Jewish people and anyone claiming the name of Yeshua.

I learned this the hard way, riding a bus through the hills outside Ariel with my brother. The Orthodox Jewish man sitting beside us looked at us like we had grown a second head when we told him we had come to bless Israel. All he knew of Christians, he said, were the stories his grandfather told him in Lithuania, stories of Christians dragging Jews into the streets on holy days and beating them half to death. I had no answer for him that day except silence, and honestly, silence was the right answer. Some wounds are not healed with words. They are healed slowly, with years of showing up, proving love through action, rather than words with no visible substance. Actions were taken in hatred, defiling the Name we bear. Now acts of love and service must be the balm that brings reparation to His name.

We must listen before we speak, acknowledge the pain and wounds and not rush to insist that it will be different this time. We don’t deserve trust. It is not owed to us. It has to be earned, one action at a time.

U is for Unload

I thought I was clean of it. After all, I loved the Jewish people. I did not believe in Replacement Theology, or so I thought. And then I moved to Israel, and I started living among the Jewish people, watching how they live, and something strange kept happening inside me. I would see a light switch left untouched on Shabbat and feel a flicker of judgment rise up before I even knew what hit me. Legalistic, I would think. And then I would catch myself and ask, where did that thought even come from?

Quite simply, it came from centuries of marination in anti-biblical theologies that crept their way into the Church. You do not carry it because you consciously chose it. You carry it because it was slow-dripped into you through nuances in sermons, hymns, and traditional Church culture. It does not evaporate the moment you decide you disagree with it on paper. Negativity towards the Jews has to be unloaded the way you unload something complex and painful, piece by piece, again and again, every time it resurfaces.

Gradually I learned to ask instead of assume. I asked the man who would not turn on his lights why he kept that tradition, and he took me straight back to Genesis 1, to the God who spoke light into being and then rested. Suddenly what looked like legalism looked like reverence. I was the one who needed correcting, not him. That is what unloading looks like. It is humility with its sleeves rolled up.

G is for Give

Everything we have as followers of Yeshua, we received through Jewish hands. The Scriptures were written by Jewish prophets. Our Messiah was born a Jewish son. And the Scriptures we treasure were meticulously preserved by them throughout the centuries. Paul says it plainly in Romans 15, if the Gentiles have shared in the spiritual riches of the Jewish people, then they also owe them a debt. And that debt is paid in material things.

“For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings” (Romans 15:27).

This is not charity looking down from a height; it is a son returning something to the father who fed him. 

I have facilitated a single wire transfer becoming a fence around a threatened farm and witnessed a modest gift crack through centuries of understandable bitterness and distrust.

S is for Serve

Giving is a gift from your wallet. Serving is a gift with your hands and feet. Both are needed, and Scripture holds both of them up as beautiful. 

Two poignant examples come to mind. First, think of the centurion in Luke 7, a Roman soldier who loved the Jewish nation so much he built them a synagogue with his own resources. Yeshua healed his servant because of it. 

Then consider Cornelius in Acts 10, a Gentile with such a reputation for kindness toward the Jewish people that heaven itself sent an angel to fetch Peter on his behalf. These were ordinary men who put their hands to the plow and blessed Israel.

I have pruned vines in Samaria until my forearms ached, and I’ve also harvested tons of grapes in the hot sun, serving the Jewish farmers in the Biblical Heartland. There is a depth of impact that only comes from showing up with a heart to serve. 

Bread and Water Is Still the Standard

Long before Jerusalem fell to Babylon, before the Temple was built, and before the kings of Israel reigned, a test was given to the nations.

Deuteronomy 23 tells us that the Ammonites and Moabites were barred from the assembly of the LORD, to the tenth generation–for one simple failure. They did not meet Israel with bread and water on the road out of Egypt. They also hired Balaam to curse the Jewish people. No armies. No great battles. Just a refusal to bring bread and water to a nation traveling through the desert. The consequences echoed for ten generations.

I think about that standard when I drive past the small communities scattered through these hills. Communities with families full of small children who watch their husbands and fathers called north and south to defend the nation while their own hillside sits exposed. The bread and water of this generation may look a little different than it did in the wilderness. But it still looks like showing up with care and love. 

There is also a second half to the test. One that is very relevant in our time. Balaam was hired to speak a curse, to twist truth into propaganda aimed at a people who had done nothing to deserve it. We are watching his descendants work overtime today, flooding every screen we own with propaganda dressed up as journalism. Refusing to repeat a lie, taking thirty extra seconds to check what you are about to share, standing up in a room and simply telling the truth–that is bread and water too. 

The Grand Finale

Matthew 25 describes Yeshua returning in glory, sitting on His throne, and all the nations gathered before Him like sheep and goats waiting to be sorted. To the sheep He says, “I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” When they ask Him, bewildered, when they ever did such a thing, He answers, “As much as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

His brothers. Read in its own context, that phrase is pointing straight at the Jewish people, the physical family Yeshua was born into and never separated from. 

Every act of humility, every ounce of baggage we unload, every gift we send, every hour we serve, every jug of water we carry to a thirsty hillside, is being counted in a ledger far larger than we can see. This is not a side issue tucked into the corner of our faith. It sits at the very center of how the nations will be judged when the King returns to Zion.

You do not need a plane ticket to begin. You do not need every theological question answered first. You only need an open hand instead of a closed fist, a willingness to come low and act in humbleness, to keep unloading what does not belong in our hearts, and to carry your own bread and water to Yeshua’s brethren. Let’s get it right this time and bless God’s anointed!

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