The elderly have to choose between food and medicine; there isn’t enough income. Some who choose food are too frail to feed themselves; they live alone. Others suffer, and even die, from the heat of day and the cold of night; there isn’t any air conditioning.
The television camera shows them living in parched, wrinkled skin. They weep through mumbled words of despair; pleading for help.
Those are touching scenes from a particular series of television programs. They are designed to elicit compassion from the viewer. The program’s host tells us that money is desperately needed to assist these precious people.
Contributions, we are told, would be used to address the above situations, and would further provide for their medical and dental care, and for upgrades to their housing conditions.
These people do need help. It is a good thing to contribute to projects such as this. The thing that I don’t like about the program, though, is the main appeal, or hook, that is used as the basis for the program’s solicitations.
The program’s host would have the viewer believe that because the people in need are Jewish, and are God’s people, the Christian viewer is supposed to be obligated to send a contribution.
What I find wrong with that assertion is that the Jewish people are not any more God’s chosen people. The Jewish nation forfeited that designation almost two thousand years ago.
God has a different group of chosen people in this present time. They are what the Jewish people were meant to be when they were the chosen ones—a light in this world, spreading the rays of the gospel truth. Click here for more on this topic.
Indeed, it’s true that Christianity does have a spiritual kinship with the Jewish religion. In fact, I think Christianity is the finishing or fulfillment of Judaism. If one gives because of the Judeo/Christian relationship, well, that would seem to be a fair enough reason; I suppose.
But, in my opinion, the bottom line of the Christian’s actions should be unbiased. The motivation to help Jews trapped in the aforementioned circumstances should be based purely on the fact that they are people in need. It should be a help that is given simply because the plight of the people has been brought to the Christian’s attention.
That’s far better than soliciting and giving on behalf of a people perceived to be special. Hurting, desperate people of other ethnicities in other lands, including our own, are no less precious and valuable in God’s eyes.