April 25, 2026 
Pastor Jack Graham 

I have walked the streets of Jerusalem more times than I can count. I have stood on the Mount of Olives at sunrise and watched the ancient city come alive in golden light. I have prayed at the Western Wall alongside devout Jewish men and women who rock and weep and cry out to a God who hears them. And every single time I return from Israel, I come home more convinced than ever of this truth: To love God is to love Israel. To follow Jesus is to stand with the Jewish people. This is not a political statement. It is a biblical one. 

Today, that conviction will be deepened at the Holocaust Museum. What you are about to walk through is not simply a museum. It is a confrontation with the darkest expression of human hatred in recorded history, and with the question that hatred forces every Christian to answer: Where do we stand? 

We Are Debtors to the Jewish People 
Before we enter those doors, I want to begin with gratitude. Because before we can fully understand why the Holocaust should break our hearts, we have to understand what the Jewish people mean to us as followers of Jesus Christ. 

Every promise in your Bible came through Jewish hands. Every patriarch, every prophet, every psalmist was a Jewish man or woman carried along by the Holy Spirit to give us the very Word of God. The Law came through Moses. The Psalms came through David. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel and Zechariah, all Jewish. And then came the New Testament, written almost entirely by Jewish authors, recording the life and words and Resurrection of the Jewish Messiah. 

Jesus was Jewish. Born in Bethlehem to a young Jewish mother. Circumcised on the eighth day. Presented at the Temple. Raised in the synagogue. He read from the Hebrew scrolls in Nazareth and celebrated Passover with His disciples in Jerusalem. And He died on a Roman cross outside that same city, bearing the sins of the world, Jew and Gentile alike.  

We are, as the Apostle Paul explains in Romans 11, wild branches that have been grafted into a root we did not plant. We drink from a well we did not dig. We stand on promises made to a people who are not our natural ancestors, and yet, through the grace of Jesus Christ, we have been brought near. We are not the trunk. We are the grafted branch. And we do not support the root; the root supports us. 

Gratitude alone demands that we love Israel. And gratitude is only the beginning. 

God Made a Covenant He Has Never Broken 
Four thousand years ago, God spoke to a childless wanderer named Abram and made the most consequential promise in human history: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). 

This was not a suggestion. It was not a temporary arrangement. God later confirmed it to Isaac and to Jacob. He called it an everlasting covenant, and He meant those words. God did not give the land or the promise with an expiration date. 

The Jewish people have faced Pharaoh, Haman, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod, Hitler, and a thousand enemies in between. Every one of them tried to destroy what God had promised to preserve. Every single one of them failed. The Egyptians are gone. The Assyrians are gone. The Babylonians, the Greeks, the Romans, all gone. Their empires are rubble and their names are footnotes. But the Jewish people are still here. Not because they are stronger than their enemies. Because God keeps His covenants. 

The Apostle Paul asked the question plainly in Romans 11:1: “Has God cast away His people?” And he answers with thunder: “Certainly not!” God has not abandoned them. He has not forgotten them. And He will not forsake them. “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). 

Like the Gulf Stream, that invisible river running through the open Atlantic, distinct and unmixed in the midst of all that water, the Jewish people are a current in the ocean of humanity that cannot be absorbed, cannot be assimilated, cannot be destroyed. Because God Himself is holding them in the stream of His sovereign purpose. 

The Church Was Largely Silent 
When the systematic persecution of the Jewish people began in Germany in the 1930s, when synagogues burned, when yellow stars appeared on their coats, when families disappeared into trains headed east, many in the church were silent.  

There were courageous exceptions. In the Netherlands, a watchmaker’s family named ten Boom hid Jewish neighbors in a secret room behind a bookshelf until they were betrayed and arrested. Corrie ten Boom survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her father, Casper, did not. Before his arrest, he was asked whether he understood the risk of hiding Jews. He answered: “It would be an honor to give my life for God’s ancient people.” That is the voice of a man who understood his Bible.  

No Panic in Heaven. Only Plans. 
Corrie ten Boom came out of the death camps carrying a truth she had learned in the worst place on earth. She said it for the rest of her life to anyone who would listen: “There is no panic in heaven. Only plans.” 

God was not absent from the Holocaust. He was present in every barracks, in every moment of suffering, sustaining a remnant and weeping over every life taken. And He kept the promise He had made through the prophet Isaiah: “He will set His hand again the second time to recover the remnant of His people from the four corners of the earth” (Isaiah 11:11). 

In 1948, just three years after the liberation of the death camps, the impossible happened. A people targeted for extinction stood on the soil of their ancient homeland and declared a nation. The State of Israel was born, not by military superiority or political convenience, but by the sovereign hand of the God who had never stopped keeping His covenant. And the greatest miracle of the modern age unfolded before a world that had just tried to exterminate the very people through whom God promised to bless all nations. 

The rebirth of Israel is the super sign of our prophetic times. It is God’s answer to the Holocaust, not an explanation, but a declaration: I am still here. My covenant still stands. My people are still Mine. 

Never Again Must Mean Something 
Anti-Semitism did not die in 1945. It went underground for a season, and it is rising again. It is rising on the campuses of elite American universities. It is all over social media. It is rising in the streets of Western Europe. It is rising in the rhetoric of governments that call openly for Israel’s destruction. The prophet Zechariah warned thousands of years ago that in the last days God would “make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples. All who lift it will surely hurt themselves. And all the nations of the earth will gather against it” (Zechariah 12:3). We are watching the early stages of that gathering; this is not as political analysis, but as biblical prophecy fulfilling itself in real time. 

And America’s own relationship with Israel is not exempt from this reckoning. One of the primary reasons God has blessed this nation is that America has historically stood with Israel. To abandon that commitment is not simply a geopolitical miscalculation. It is a covenant violation. God said without ambiguity: “I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you.” Every nation, every generation stands accountable to that promise. 

Never again must mean something. For the Christian, it must mean more than a slogan. It must mean a commitment rooted in Scripture, sustained by prayer, and expressed in action: speaking when others go quiet, standing with Israel when the cost of standing rises, and loving the Jewish people as those for whom your Messiah, their Messiah, came and bled and rose. 

What This Day Requires of Us 
So what does  all this demand of us? It requires three things. 

First, pray. The Bible is explicit: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (Psalm 122:6). This is not a suggestion buried in an obscure passage. It is a direct command, and it comes with a promise: “they shall prosper who love you.” It will come when the Prince of Peace returns. But until that Day, we are to cry out to God on behalf of His ancient city and His chosen people. 

Second, stand. At a time when nations are turning away from Israel, when campuses erupt with anti-Semitism, when international bodies single out Israel for condemnation while ignoring the atrocities of surrounding nations, the Church of Jesus Christ must be the most reliable friend Israel has on earth. We stand with Israel not because she is always right in every political decision, but because God made her a promise, and we serve the God who keeps His promises. We stand with Israel because our Savior was Jewish. Because our Scripture is Jewish. Because our hope is rooted in the faithfulness of a God who made a covenant in Canaan 4,000 years ago and has never broken it. 

Third, share the Gospel. The greatest act of love we can ever extend to the Jewish people is to introduce them to their own Messiah. Jesus is not a Gentile God. He is Yeshua, the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the fulfillment of every promise written in the Hebrew Scriptures. We love the Jewish people too much to be silent about the One who died and rose again to redeem them. We do not preach to convert them from their heritage. We preach to bring them home to their King. 

Zechariah’s prophecies do not end with the nations gathered against Jerusalem. He ends with a fountain: “On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness” (Zechariah 13:1). There is coming a day when the Jewish people will look upon the One they have pierced, and they will mourn, and they will believe, and the fountain of His grace will be opened wide to them. “All Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26). That promise will be kept, as surely as every other promise God has ever made. 

Walk through this museum today with your eyes open and your heart open. Let what you see move you from sorrow to conviction, to love what God loves, to stand where God stands, and to say with the force of everything you have witnessed here: 

Never again.