Notes on a sermon delivered at Peachtree Road Baptist Church on 06/07/2026 The full sermon can be viewed on Youtube
Pastor Reed arrives at the pulpit the evening of Sunday June 7 claiming to have “had this particular sermon percolating in my brain for a while.” This is the posture he seems to favor most: not an exegete approaching a sacred text with trembling hands, but a man who has been brewing a revelation and is finally ready to dispense it upon an undeserving world. The topic, he announces, is the next installment of his Third Rail Theology series, and this week the third rail is antisemitism.
“For independent Baptist churches to accept antisemitism in any form is at best a misunderstanding of clear Bible teaching, and at worst it’s a work of the devil in our midst.”—Pastor Jay Reed
I pause here, because something vital is missing from this diagnosis, and the absence is clinically alarming. Reed grants antisemitism exactly two origins, a misunderstanding of dispensational charts or literal demonic possession, and neither tells you a single concrete thing about why a specific group of young men, in this specific moment, is drifting toward this specific bigotry. That question has worldly answers: a grievance, an algorithm, an “America First” podcast feed. But a worldly cause would obligate Reed to do worldly work, to understand the pull of the argument and out-reason it. You cannot out-reason a demon. You can only rebuke it, which demands zero engagement with whatever the demon was actually saying.
Notice where both origins are located. Each sits entirely inside the head of the antisemite, one as an error and the other as an entity. In neither does an actual Jewish person appear as someone who might be in danger, and the danger is not abstract.
In 2024 the FBI logged 1,938 anti-Jewish hate crimes, the highest since it began counting in 1991. Jews are roughly two percent of the country and absorbed about one in six of all reported hate crimes that year, the most-targeted religious group in America by a wide margin.
A sermon that treats Jew-hatred purely as a doctrinal math error has quietly moved the subject off of the people who suffer antisemitism and onto the private cosmology of the men who commit it.
Reed does let Jewish suffering into the room, eventually, but watch which suffering he reaches for. Rockets, the wars of 1948 and 1967 and 1973, the dead of October 7: every example is violence bound up in the conflict over Israel, harm that arrives attached to a war and a contested border. The violence he never names is the kind with no conflict behind it at all, the kind whose only cause is that the victim is a Jew. A synagogue shot up in Pittsburgh, a rabbi and his congregants taken hostage in a Texas sanctuary, an Orthodox man beaten on a Brooklyn sidewalk. That second category is what the word antisemitism actually denotes, and it is the engine behind all 1,938 of those hate crimes. Which leaves Reed somewhere strange: he has preached a sermon against antisemitism that does not contain a single act of antisemitic violence. He can see a Jew harmed in a war over Israel. He cannot see a Jew attacked, on this side of the Atlantic, for nothing but being a Jew.
Then comes the opening prayer, and the real subject of Reed’s anxiety finally solidifies. Reed doesn’t choose this sacred moment to ask God’s intervention to protect Jewish Americans from violence. Instead, he asks God to:
“…give our young men purity and understanding, purity and character, purity and doctrine,” and to let the church “lean heavily on them for the future.” —Pastor Jay Reed
In a sermon that claimed to address the world’s oldest hatred, Reed is primarily concerned about the Independent Fundamental Baptist supply chain. These young men are not an incidental concern. Reed says it himself a few minutes later:
“Young men have been the key to the success of the independent Baptist movement. And sadly, as fewer have surrendered, the movement has experienced decline.” —Pastor Jay Reed
So before we have reached a single verse, we know what this sermon is actually about. It is not about hate speech targeting Jewish people. It is about a pastor who can feel a particular slice of his congregation drifting toward voices he cannot out-shout, and who has decided to stand athwart that drift yelling stop.
What we are watching is a turf war inside the American right, and the pastor has correctly identified that he is losing it.
I will resist the temptation to narrate his interior weather. I cannot see inside the man. But I can describe what the sermon does. What it does is name secular media figures, the ones whose offense is criticizing Israeli policy or questioning American military intervention in the region, far more often than it names anyone in Scripture, while never once naming the fundamentalist preachers who actually traffic in Jew-hatred. It returns compulsively to the subject of young men slipping away.
There is also, lurking under all of this, a theological substitution that he will never name and may not have noticed. The thing God made a covenant with in Genesis is a man and his descendants, a people, a chosen line in redemptive history. The thing Reed wants you to defend at the ballot box is not that thing, but a modern nation-state with a foreign ministry, a 2026 cabinet, and an air force.
These are not the same noun. Holding them apart is the single most important act of reading anyone could perform on this material, and over the next forty minutes Reed will weld them together so thoroughly that by the end the word “Israel” means both at once, and therefore neither precisely.
A Nation the Size of New Jersey, Or; The Arithmetic of Demons
The body of the sermon opens with a geopolitical flex. Reed wants you to grasp how absurd it is that the world is so fixated on Israel, and his chosen rhetorical instrument is comparative acreage. Israel, he reports, “would be the fourth smallest state in the United States of America. Smaller than New Jersey, which is the fifth smallest state.” Then comes the population data:
“9.6 million. Say, well, that’s a lot of people. That’s 97th on the list of nations. It’s behind Togo… Togo. There are more people in Togo than there are in the nation of Israel.” —Pastor Jay Reed
I have a confession. When Jay Reed deploys statistics, I usually pause to fact-check him, fully expecting to uncover another “Vibe Number.” (For those new here, that’s a signature genre of PRBC data which arrives with total confidence and absolutely zero sourcing.) But in this case, I didn’t need to. The fact that Jay Reed is comparing the population of Israel to an obscure West African republic that I am entirely certain he could not locate on a map tells me one thing: he actually looked this one up. We will let his fun fact stand unchallenged.
The argument built on top of it, however, does not. Walk it through with me on the whiteboard. The implied syllogism runs: (1) Israel is tiny; (2) the world pays it enormous attention; (3) therefore, that attention is “inexplicable,” and because it is inexplicable, it must be “demonic.”
If you suspect I am uncharitably exaggerating his premise, I assure you, he says it out loud:
“The fixation on Israel by politicians, influencers, and world leaders is inexplicable. Actually, it’s not. It’s demonic.” —Pastor Jay Reed
Setting aside the theological diagnosis, the baseline premise is staggeringly flawed. Smallness does not make attention inexplicable. Vatican City is roughly the size of an 18-hole golf course and commands the religious attention of a billion Catholics and the diplomatic attention of the globe. The geopolitical weight of a location is not a function of its acreage; it is a function of what is at the location and what is happening there.
And there the state of Israel sits, situated on a patch of historically contested ground that happens to contain the holiest real estate of the three great Abrahamic religions, while serving as the focal point for seventy-five years of the most internationally entangled conflict in modern history. You may hold opinions about that conflict in any direction, but “the country is smaller than New Jersey, therefore caring about it is satanic” is not an argument.
It is a non sequitur.
Then comes the villain roll call:
“From Haman to Hitler, from Obama to Owens, from Carter to Carlson, from Arafat to Ahmadinejad.” —Pastor Jay Reed
This is, apparently, guilt by alliteration. A simple literary parlor trick asked to perform the heavy lifting of actual historical equivalence, smoothly sliding former American presidents and a conservative podcaster into the exact same breath as the architect of the Holocaust. Impressive.
Reed then opens Romans 11, and I want to slow all the way down, because what Paul is doing in this chapter and what Reed does with it are nearly as opposite as Obama and Hitler.
Romans 11 is, by any serious academic or theological account, one of the most intellectually vertiginous passages Paul ever wrote. Its subject is the crushing mystery of why God’s chosen people have, on the whole, not received the Messiah, and what that theological reality means for the rest of the world. Paul’s answer is not geopolitical triumph. It is a sustained, agonizing meditation on sovereign mercy: there is a remnant “according to the election of grace,” and the Gentiles have been grafted in like a wild olive branch onto a cultivated root system they did not plant.
Crucially, Paul turns and warns those grafted-in Gentiles directly: be not highminded, but fear. Do not boast against the natural branches. The chapter ends not with a foreign policy mandate, but with a doxology—Paul throwing up his hands at the sheer, unsearchable depth of divine mercy toward everyone.
It is, in other words, a chapter whose explicit pastoral punchline is Gentile humility. It exists in the biblical canon to stop exactly the kind of swagger that treats the Abrahamic covenant as a club to be wielded.
Reed, naturally, uses it as a blunt instrument to demand allegiance to the modern Israeli government.
He lands on verse 28: “As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes.” To his credit, he does insist you read both halves of the verse. But watch what he does with the first half. The text becomes a launching pad for the claim that the Jewish people are “still enemies” of the gospel “right now,” and that “nothing has changed.”
And there is the pit, though Reed never notices he has stepped into it. He is standing in the one chapter of the New Testament written specifically to stop Gentile Christians from talking this way, and he is using it to do the exact thing it prohibits. Paul’s warning—be not highminded, but fear—is addressed to the grafted-in branch that starts feeling superior to the natural ones. Reed reads the text aloud and then performs the behavior it condemns, in real time, from the same page.
The chapter is a fire extinguisher. Reed has picked it up by the wrong end and is using it to bludgeon the congregation while the kitchen burns. That is the opposition I promised you between Paul and his interpreter, and it is not a mere difference of homiletical emphasis. It is a sermon whose core application is the precise error its proof-text was authored to prevent.
In fairness, and the fairness cuts toward my point rather than away from it, Reed does eventually recite the humility. In the closing prayer, some forty minutes after he opened the chapter, he tells the room that “we are God’s people, but we’re not the originals,” that “we came along a lot later,” that God “removed some of the natural branches so he could engraft us in,” and that “our position was not nearly as historical.” That is Paul’s warning, very nearly intact. But he delivers it as a benediction, a thing said on the way out the door, when in Romans 11 it is the governing instruction, the discipline meant to shape everything preached before it. Be not highminded is not how you sign off. It is the rule you were supposed to read first and obey throughout. Reed had the antidote in hand, read it aloud, and used it to close the service.
Having successfully inverted the Apostle Paul for nth time, the sermon wanders off to check a date, and we may as well follow it, because what happens next is a breathtaking micro-disaster of intellectual vanity.
Reed asks who has a Scofield Reference Bible. He wants to establish the date of the Roman epistle, lands on roughly 60 AD, and then, sensing an opening to display his erudition, quizzes the room: “What does AD mean?”
Someone in the pews answers correctly. He thanks them and, unable to leave his own erudition alone, sneers: “You Latin speakers, like anybody cares.” He explains that the Latin means “in the year of our Lord”—which is accurate—and then, a mere two sentences later, confidently explains the abbreviation again:
“BC is before Christ. AD is after the death of Christ.” —Pastor Jay Reed
My marker hovers over the whiteboard like a record scratch. He gave the right answer and the wrong answer inside the same sixty seconds. Anno Domini means “in the year of the Lord,” and the calendar is reckoned from the traditional year of Jesus’s incarnation, not his death. The man who has just openly mocked his own audience for caring about Latin has, in the very act of dismissing it, accidentally knocked roughly three decades out of the Western calendar.
Why was this chronological detour important? I’m afraid I got as lost as Jay did in this side trail. Oh, yes—Reed was establishing the timeline to prove that Jews are historical “enemies” of the church. Changing keys slightly, Reed brings this theological animus into the present day, arriving at conservative commentator Ben Shapiro:
“Smart guy. Talks really fast, crazy eyebrows, but not a follower of Jesus Christ.” —Pastor Jay Reed
Reed explains that Shapiro rejects the gospel because he “doesn’t want to give up that yam on his head,” and then, gesturing broadly to mock the yarmulke:
“Imagine if you only had to comb the front of your hair.” —Pastor Jay Reed
The joke dies on the vine, and Reed awkwardly acknowledges the audience’s silence (“I thought that was a winner”).
In my endlessly generous attitude toward this congregation, I prefer to believe this deafening silence was the audience recognizing the jarring, hypocritical dissonance of a pastor deploying casual, schoolyard antisemitism in a sermon ostensibly dedicated to eradicating it.
But realistically, the silence was probably just because the joke was agonizingly lame. Maybe Reed was testing us. If so, great news: we passed.
Three Gods, Two Brides, But Don’t Call This Polytheism
Having promised to systematically dismantle “replacement theology” next week, Reed cannot resist offering a preview. And this preview is where the evening briefly departs from the familiar, rusted tracks of standard IFB dispensationalism and constructs something genuinely bizarre.
Reed needs to explain how the Jewish people remain God’s covenant people while the Church is also God’s people, without one having replaced the other. His solution, it turns out, is a complicated domestic arrangement.
“The bride of the father is the nation of Israel. The church is the bride not of the father but of the son. We are the bride of Christ.” —Pastor Jay Reed
Reed elaborates on this divine polyamory: the Father took a bride (Israel), but “put her away for a time.” During this interval, “the son came and took a bride,” but “the son’s bride is different. The father’s bride was one nation. The son’s bride is all nations.”
Perhaps sensing, dimly, that the Godhead is getting uncomfortably crowded, Reed attempts to fortify his position by loudly attacking Pentecostal theology:
“Now please tell me you don’t believe this charismatic Jesus oneness only thing. That’s ridiculous. There is God the father. He is distinct. There is God the son. He is distinct. There is God the Holy Ghost. He is distinct. These three are one. But these three are three.” —Pastor Jay Reed
Let us walk this difficulty out slowly, for Jay’s benefit. Historic, orthodox Christianity does indeed hold that the persons of the Trinity are distinct. So far, so creedal. But it also holds, with equal and foundational force, that the persons are inseparable in their action toward the world (the classical doctrine of inseparable operations). This is, quite literally, the only reason Christians are allowed to continue calling themselves monotheists. The external works of the Trinity are undivided: the three persons do not run separate enterprises, keep separate calendars, or pursue separate aims.
The moment you give the Father one wife and the Son a different wife, you have not deepened the doctrine; you have quietly broken the religion. You now have two divine persons with two separate covenant partners and two distinct marital histories. You have turned the Trinity into a duplex with two marriages and one conspicuously unwed lodger. (Spare a passing thought here for the Holy Ghost, who in this arrangement “has names that belong only to him” and is, somehow, the only member of the Godhead left without a spouse to manage.)
The actual scriptural picture is far simpler and infinitely more beautiful than the theological sitcom Reed has scripted. In the Hebrew Bible, the LORD is the husband of Israel. In the New Testament, Christ is the husband of the Church. The historic, orthodox reading is that this is one covenant love stretched across two testaments—one God betrothing one people whose redemptive story runs out of Israel and into the Church. It is not a story of two divine bachelors taking out separate leases so they don’t accidentally discover they are married to the same overarching plan.
But Reed desperately needs this permanent separation. It is the only theological mechanism that yields the political result he wants: a secular nation-state that is owed unconditional geopolitical allegiance forever, and a Church that is doctrinally obligated to provide it.
The cost of this rhetorical maneuver is simply pivoting to polytheism and hoping no one in the pews notices. Splitting the one God into three autonomous agents who act with separate aims is, in the historic vocabulary, tritheism. It has been classified as a fatal error since roughly the fourth century. But this is the IFB house style: an ordinary doctrine is inflated into a theological Rube Goldberg machine so that the sheer complexity can pass for intellectual depth.
The sauce is, apparently, heresy.
Interlude: The Line the Sermon Will Not Draw But I Must
I let the villain roll-call go by with a note about alliteration, and that was too gentle. Let’s take another look at that quote for a small aside:
“It’s not new. From Haman to Hitler, from Obama to Owens, from Carter to Carlson, from Arafat to Ahmadinejad, dictators and directors, celebrities and self-appointed experts, religious leaders and royals, podcasters and people in positions of power and authority. There is never a shortage of useful idiots ready to beat the drums of antisemitism.” —Pastor Jay Reed
The list is built to be read as one substance in varying concentrations, the same demonic fixation showing up in a genocidal vizier and in Tucker Carlson, differing only by degree.
But these are not differences of degree. They are differences in kind. Flattening them into a single alliterative chain does catastrophic damage to the conversation, precisely because it refuses to make a distinction that any honest treatment of the subject is ethically and intellectually obligated to make.
The distinction is this: Antisemitism is hostility toward Jews as Jews—as a people, a lineage, a faith. Criticism of the State of Israel is disagreement with the decisions of a geopolitical government.
The two can overlap, and bigots have learned to launder the first as the second, so the overlap is worth being very cautious about. But they are not the same thing, and collapsing them is not rigor, it is the quiet destruction of a category we cannot afford to lose.
Take Carter, since Reed offered him. This is the man who brokered the Camp David Accords, the first peace treaty between Israel and any Arab neighbor, which is to say he did more for the physical safety of actual living Israelis than the entire podcast roster Reed spends the evening fretting about. In 2006 he published a book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, arguing that Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank was tending toward a system he was willing to call apartheid. Reasonable people found the book unfair. That is allowed. That is what disagreement about a government’s conduct is supposed to look like. But Carter said, repeatedly and on the record, that his subject was policy in the occupied territories, and that, in his words, “it’s not based on racism.” Whatever you finally conclude about the book, “wrote a contested book criticizing settlement policy” and “belongs on a list with the architect of the murder of six million Jews” are not claims of the same order, and to shelve them under one heading is to make the word antisemitism mean nothing whatsoever.
A word that has to cover both Heinrich Himmler and a Nobel Peace laureate who negotiated a treaty for Israel is no longer a word. It is a cudgel with the label rubbed off.
Now we arrive at the harder half of the equation—the half Reed’s lazy methodology actively betrays.
The genuine article exists. I want to be completely clear about this, because the entire reason we must draw a boundary line is so we can clearly identify the real poison standing on the far side of it. There is, right now, a virulent and specific antisemitism moving through the broader fundamentalist world. It is not a hypothetical, and it is not a strawman. It has an address.
The network that goes by the name “New IFB,” gathered around the Arizona preacher Steven Anderson (a name conspicuously absent from Reed’s roster), explicitly teaches that the Jewish people today are imposters, that they constitute a literal “synagogue of Satan,” and that they control global finance and media. Anderson has personally produced and promoted flat Holocaust denial of the “the numbers don’t add up” variety.
That is antisemitism. That is the exact darkness the word was built to name. And it is reaching precisely the demographic Reed is sweating over: young fundamentalist men with smartphones. The conspiracy line Reed quotes off his own pews—the one about “the Bilderbergers and the Jewish families and the directors in Hollywood”—is a clean, unadulterated sample of it.
Which is what turns Reed’s conflation into a double failure. By spending his sermon shadow-boxing Carter and Carlson, Reed defames the wrong people and leaves the actual threat completely upright.
And what is Pastor Reed’s weapon against this actual, soul-rotting poison infecting his youth group?
“Here’s a very educated reply, dude. Shut up.” —Pastor Jay Reed
A threat is not a refutation. The nineteen-year-old who has genuinely swallowed the Anderson line and who now believes the Jews are not the real Jews and the gas chambers are a hoax is not going to surrender these views because Reed told him to shut up. He’s simply learned not to say it out loud inside the Peachtree Road Baptist Church building.
The bitter irony here is that the tool that would actually work is already lying inert in Reed’s hand. The standing-covenant theology he asserted all evening of Romans 11, is itself a direct, frankly devastating exegetical answer to the New IFB’s “synagogue of Satan” doctrine. But Reed doesn’t know how to wield it against the real target. He just points it at a dead president.
There is one last “tell” before I return to my seat in the pew. The single most New-IFB-flavored idea in the entire sermon is one Reed supplies himself. Midway through his defense of the Jewish people, he casually floats the idea that the Antichrist “very well could be part Jewish.”
The Jewish Antichrist is a signature, foundational talking point of the very anti-semitic network I just described. (To be fair, it has older roots in dusty dispensational speculation, so I will not claim he picked it up directly from Anderson.) But it is a breathtakingly reckless thing to press into your young men’s hands during a sermon whose stated purpose is pulling them back from anti-semitic conspiracy theories. It is a loose thread that runs directly into the ecosystem you are supposedly trying to extract them from.
I Tawt I Taw a Treaty
Having abandoned his attempt to rewrite the Western calendar, Reed retreats to the safer terrain of Genesis 12 to establish that the Abrahamic covenant is unconditional. It has no “off switch,” he insists, and the divine land grant to Abraham still stands. In fact, he notes, the real estate portfolio is far larger than the current map reflects: “It’s supposed to be from the Euphrates River cleared down to the Nile.”
To make this ancient, staggering theological concept resonate in the bones of suburban Georgians, Reed needs an analogy. He selects the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the 1848 agreement that ended the Mexican-American War and transferred most of the modern American Southwest to the United States. It is a defensible, if historically fraught, choice for an illustration about land rights and binding agreements.
“Let’s say that Mexico decided not to respect,” he begins, “the tweety of the tweet, the Tweety, the Tweety of Guadalupe.” —Pastor Jay Reed
He hears it as it leaves his mouth.
“I should just quit,” he says. “I can’t. How do you recover from the Tweety of Guadalupe?…”I thought I saw a puddy tat. I did saw a puddy tat.” —Pastor Jay Reed
For forty minutes Reed has been constructing himself as the watchman, the man with notes, the man who knows what AD stands for (he does not), the man who can correct the young men and their podcasters. There is a parable in here about the gap between the register a man reaches for and the substance he actually delivers, but I will let it sit.
He tries to recover the only way men operating in this specific register know how to recover: by getting louder and endorsing violence. He immediately pivots to narrating the Mexican-American War as a triumph of American physical dominance:
“my son Austin can go into details about how we took the ruler of Mexico and slapped him around and said, you need to sign this. He said no, so he slapped him around some more.” —Pastor Jay Reed
The model citizen of this analogy, the entity whose behavior we are meant to admire, is a victor who obtained a signature through repeated violence. And Reed is offering this, remember, as a picture of the Abrahamic covenant, the covenant he also insists is unconditional, freely given, and grounded entirely in God’s character rather than in coercion.
He keeps going, into a riff about whether he would defend the Southwest if Mexico wanted it back.
“If they said I wanted New Mexico back, I honestly would give them that. That is a giant trailer park.” —Pastor Jay Reed
On California: “I don’t know if I’d have put up a fight. Start with Los Angeles.” This gets the warmest response of the night, which tells you something about the room’s actual appetites, and then he wrenches the whole thing back to the point: the United States would not recognize anyone else’s claim to its land “because we have a treaty,” and likewise “the Jews should not have to recognize the right of anyone else to live there because they have a treaty. And one of the signatories on the treaty is God.”
So here is the finished syllogism, assembled from the wreckage. The United States holds California by right obtained by conquest and ratified by treaty. Israel holds its land by right of a treaty (the Abrahamic covenant) whose cosigner is God. Therefore the modern state’s borders, and indeed its claim to everything from the Nile to the Euphrates, are not a matter of politics but of divine deed. The covenant people of Genesis and the foreign ministry of 2026 are, for the purposes of this sermon, one entity (unlike Reed’s Deity). To question the policy of the second is to defy the promise made to the first.
“When they start saying that the Jews need to trade land for peace, that’s not what God said. I think you ought to be on the Lord’s side.” —Pastor Jay Reed
The Abrahamic Vending Machine, Or; How to Buy a Blessing
The sermon’s meandering detours through land grants, blessings, seeds, and geopolitical protection all converge, finally, on Genesis 12:3. Reed reads the first half of the verse (I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee) and excitedly declares, “This is it, still in force today.”
And here, at the very end, the redemptive arc of the biblical text is quietly, surgically amputated. Almost no one in the room will notice, because the amputated portion is the part that was actually about them.
Read the verse to its end: And in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
That final clause is not poetic decoration. It is the destination of the entire covenant. Paul, reading this exact verse in Galatians, calls it the gospel preached beforehand to Abraham, and he is emphatic that the “seed” through whom all families would be blessed is, in the singular, the Messiah. The covenant with Abraham was never a closed loop between God and one patriarch’s bank account. It was a promise pointed outward, aimed at every family on earth, with Abraham as the channel and Christ as the fulfillment.
Reed even lists “a seed” as one of his four sermon points. But he routes it exclusively to Genesis 15 and the stars of the sky, the multitude, and never once connects the seed to the singular Seed. He does read the final clause aloud, once, much earlier, when he needs the verse for a different errand. Establishing that the covenant has no “off switch,” he recites the whole sentence, “all families of the earth” included, and then walks straight past it. The universal, missionary, Christ-centered telos of the Abrahamic covenant is sitting in the second half of the sentence he keeps reaching for, but it doesn’t serve his application.
What serves his application is the first half of the verse, and the application is this:
“Let me just do an informal poll and we’ll close the service. How many could use a blessing? … Okay, seems like everybody. Here’s one. Doesn’t take much.” —Pastor Jay Reed
Bless Israel, and God blesses you. “You know what I want this church to do? Prosper.” And the theological inversion is completed without a shred of embarrassment:
“Let’s choose blessing for myself, for my companions, for my brethren, for my friends and my family. I want them to be blessed, so I’ll be right about Israel.” —Pastor Jay Reed
He does not say, “I will be right about Israel, and blessing may follow.” The order is entirely reversed: I want the blessing, therefore I will adopt the position. The theological conviction is the instrument; the personal payout is the goal.
A 4,000-year-old covenant whose climax is the redemption of every family on earth through the bleeding of the Messiah has been converted, in the space of a three-minute altar call, into a geopolitical lucky charm.
Raise your hand if you could use some prosperity, and Pastor Reed has a verse to broker the transaction.
Reed is not, in the end, calling his congregation to a deeper reading of Romans 11, or to Paul’s costly instruction that the grafted-in branches should fear rather than boast. He is not calling them to the love for the Jewish people that Paul says broke his own heart, “my heart’s desire and prayer for Israel is that they might be saved,” a line Reed quotes and then immediately undercuts with “I don’t think it’ll happen. I don’t see it in prophecy.”
He is offering them an informal poll. And then the closing warning, the binary from the very first minute returning to collect its dues:
“When you play with this antisemitism nonsense, you’re calling a curse down on yourself and your family. Not worth it.” —Pastor Jay Reed
The young men listening to the wrong podcasts are not, in this final frame, mistaken about geopolitics or in need of a better intellectual argument. They are courting a hex on their children. There is no version of this disagreement in which they are simply wrong and can be persuaded by a shepherd who cares for their minds. There is a blessing on offer, a curse in reserve, and a pastor holding the plug.
There is one small thing, before I close, that I cannot pretend I didn’t see. We met the “part-Jewish Antichrist” line back in the interlude, and I noted whose talking point it really is. What I left out were the four words Reed appended to it, muttered to no one in particular:
“Hey, here’s a shocker. Do you know that the Antichrist very well could be part Jewish? Put that on your blog.” —Pastor Jay Reed
I will not over-read it. He addresses podcasters, influencers, and bloggers all night as a single, homogenous, hostile category, and there is no reason to think the aside was aimed at any blog in particular rather than at the whole genre of people who have the audacity to write things down. But I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me smile to be, however generically, accounted for.
Consider it done, Pastor. It is on the blog.
Note: This analysis represents the author’s subjective interpretation of the sermon delivered on the date mentioned above. For further details, please see my full [Legal Disclaimer]
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