P1909:1, 175:2.1
The fact that the spiritual leaders and the religious teachers of the Jewish
nation onetime rejected the teachings of Jesus and conspired to bring about
his cruel death, does not in any manner affect the status of any individual
Jew in his standing before God. And it should not cause those who profess
to be followers of the Christ to be prejudiced against the Jew as a fellow
mortal. The Jews, as a nation, as a sociopolitical group, paid in full the
terrible price of rejecting the Prince of Peace. Long since they ceased to
be the spiritual torchbearers of divine truth to the races of mankind, but
this constitutes no valid reason why the individual descendants of these
long-ago
Jews should be made to suffer the persecutions which have been visited upon
them by intolerant, unworthy, and bigoted professed followers of Jesus of
Nazareth, who was, himself, a Jew by natural birth.
P1909:2, 175:2.2
Many times has this unreasoning and
un-
Christlike hatred and persecution of
modern Jews terminated in the suffering and death of some innocent and
unoffending
Jewish individual whose very ancestors, in the times of Jesus, heartily accepted
his gospel and presently died unflinchingly for that truth which they so wholeheartedly
believed. What a shudder of horror passes over the onlooking celestial beings
as they behold the professed followers of Jesus indulge themselves in persecuting,
harassing, and even
murdering the later-day descendants of Peter, Philip,
Matthew, and others of the Palestinian Jews who so gloriously yielded up their
lives as the first
martyrs of the gospel of the heavenly kingdom!
P1909:3, 175:2.3
How cruel and unreasoning to compel innocent children to suffer for the sins
of their progenitors, misdeeds of which they are wholly ignorant, and for
which they could in no way be responsible! And to do such wicked deeds in
the name of one who taught his disciples to love even their enemies! It has
become necessary, in this recital of the life of Jesus, to portray the manner
in which certain of his fellow Jews rejected him and conspired to bring about
his ignominious death; but we would warn all who read this narrative that
the presentation of such a historical recital in no way justifies the unjust
hatred, nor
condones the unfair attitude of mind, which so many professed
Christians have maintained toward individual Jews for many centuries. Kingdom
believers, those who follow the teachings of Jesus, must cease to mistreat
the individual Jew as one who is guilty of the rejection and crucifixion of
Jesus. The Father and his Creator Son have never ceased to love the Jews.
God is no respecter of persons, and salvation is for the Jew as well as for
the gentile.