Evangelical leaders in Serbia gave cautious responses to President Aleksandar Vučić's announcement that he will resign in the coming weeks, following more than a year of student-led protests against his government.
23) May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24) The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it. NIV.
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Guess! Most are working in UNSKILLED jobs on a fraction of the stated salaries.
I’m sure you’d agree with me that racism is completely unacceptable from moral, legal, and social perspectives, and that our current culture swiftly and severely punishes anyone found guilty of it.
Every major Western democracy has laws prohibiting racial discrimination in important areas of public life, and you’d be hard-pressed to find people brazen enough to stand against those frameworks and proudly show themselves to be racist.
Unless it comes to hating Jewish people.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the year 2025 was the third-highest year on record for antisemitic incidents since the group began tracking them in 1979. ADL tracked 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025, 33% lower than 2024's 9,354, but five times higher than a decade earlier. Just this month, the NORC at the University of Chicago reported that only 34% of Jewish adults feel safe as a Jewish person living in the United States today.
How heartbreaking is that?
That feeling of “unsafeness” has reached stratospheric levels at universities like Columbia, where Jewish students report harassment, intimidation, and disruption of campus life, so much so that the university leadership there faced congressional scrutiny. The same has been repeated at others like Harvard, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan.
Supporters of antisemitic behavior try to justify such actions by parading Israel’s current dealings with its enemies (and yes, the nation Israel has some faults in that area), but the fact is that such Jewish hostility has been present for a long time.
For example, when Islam first rose in 600AD, Jews in Arabia and North Africa were immediately killed and persecuted. In the 11th century, the Crusades began against Islam, but Jews were also targeted, with one battle cry being, “Kill a Jew, save your soul.”
In the 1200-1300’s, Jews were blamed for the Black Plague in Europe, with literally one-half of the Jews being murdered. In the 1490s, Spain forced 800,000 Jews into the sea, where they drowned or died from exposure. In the 1800’s, Russian Jews were murdered or forced to immigrate if they didn’t join the Russian church. During World War I, many Russian Jews were accused of spying and sent to Siberia.
I doubt I need to educate you on what happened to the Jewish people during WWII.
It kind of seems the world at large has been pre-programmed to hate Jewish people, almost like it comes naturally to them. And the Bible explains exactly why that is.
The apple of God’s eye
Let’s start with the bold declarations Scripture makes about God’s love for Israel.
Deuteronomy 7:6-8 tells us Israel is chosen and has a sovereign love bestowed on it by God: “For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth”. Zechariah 2:8 says the same thing: “For thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘After glory He has sent Me against the nations which plunder you, for he who touches you, touches the apple of His eye.’”
The Bible records that the Jewish people were used by God to bring both His written and human Word to the world. And because of those accomplishments, Israel has a special target painted on their back, which Satan and his children aim at with all their might.
Way back in the Garden, the battle lines were drawn between Israel and their enemies when God said to Satan: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel” (Gen. 3:15). The woman’s “seed” (coming through the Jewish line) eventually resulted in Jesus, but not for lack of trying on the enemy’s part to stop Him.
Cain killed the first human of the godly line (Abel, Gen. 4), but God used Seth to keep it going. Then the devil attempted to corrupt humankind through demonic/human interactions (Gen. 6).
He followed up by trying to murder all Hebrew baby boys in Egypt (Ex. 1), with his persecution through the years getting the godly line literally down to one — Joash who was preserved (2 Chron. 21). In the book of Esther, we see the enemy driving Haman’s attempt to murder all the Jews, which is followed up in the New Testament with Herod murdering all the Jewish male babies (Matt. 2).
The satanic drive against Israel is also noted in Revelation, highlighting that it is alive and well today: “And when the dragon saw that he was thrown down to the earth, he persecuted the woman [Israel] who gave birth to the male child [Christ]” (Rev. 12:13). Such actions have been, and continue to be, carried out by the ungodly line of the serpent spoken of in Genesis 3.
The Bible says “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19) and that Satan and his spiritual children look at Israel and say, “Come, and let us wipe them out as a nation, that the name of Israel be remembered no more” (Ps. 83:4). Those today hating and persecuting Jews do so, Scripture says, because they walk “according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience” (Eph. 2:2).
God warned Israel long ago that, because of their rebellion against Him, this would happen and they would “become a horror, a proverb, and a taunt among all the people where the Lord drives you” (Deut. 28:37).
Scripture lays out the persecution of Israel very plainly when it says:
“Moreover, the Lord will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth … among those nations you shall find no rest, and there will be no resting place for the sole of your foot; but there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, failing of eyes, and despair of soul. So, your life shall hang in doubt before you; and you will be in dread night and day and shall have no assurance of your life. In the morning you shall say, ‘Would that it were evening!’ And at evening you shall say, ‘Would that it were morning!’ because of the dread of your heart which you dread, and for the sight of your eyes which you will see” (Deut. 28:64–67).
But in the end, Israel is promised protection as a preserved people because, “Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” (Ps. 121:4).
An example of this is God bringing the Jewish people back to their nation in the very way He promised in the Old Testament:
“Then it will happen on that day that the Lord will again recover the second time with His hand the remnant of His people, who will remain … and He will lift up a standard for the nations and assemble the banished ones of Israel, and will gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth … before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came, she gave birth to a boy. Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Can a land be born in one day? Can a nation be brought forth all at once? As soon as Zion travailed, she also brought forth her sons” (Is. 11:11–12; 66:7-8).
That miracle happened in 1948 when Israel first declared its independence, with the nation being recognized and established in one day, as Isaiah said. The very next day, Israel was attacked, and the war of her independence was fought just as Isaiah predicted, with the birth pains coming after the nation’s birth, the first of its kind ever.
Scripture says the future of Israel is now guaranteed and that, try as her enemies might to get the land back, they are firmly and permanently established there: “I will restore the captivity of My people Israel … and they will not again be rooted out from their land which I have given them, says the Lord your God” (Amos 9:11–15).
Satan and his army have thrown everything it has at the Jewish people: empires, inquisitions, plagues blamed on them, gas chambers, and now a modern culture that claims to despise bigotry while making a curious exception for this one.
And still, Israel remains. Not by accident, and not by their own strength, but because the God who chose them keeps His word.
This is exactly what we should expect if the Bible is true. The same hatred that has hounded Israel across the centuries is described in Scripture as satanic in origin and aimed at the people through whom God brought His Word and His Son into the world. But every scheme to erase them, from Pharaoh to Haman to Hitler, has failed, and Scripture gives no reason to think today's hostility will end any differently.
The enemy and his human army may continue to rage against Israel, but they can’t overturn the decree of God. The Jewish people endure because the Lord has determined they will.
Those who bet against Israel are ultimately betting against God — and history has never been kind to those who make that wager.
19) Do not quench the Spirit. 20) Do not treat prophecies with contempt 21) but test them all; hold on to what is good, 22) reject every kind of evil.
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'Corruption is horrible': Serbian evangelicals wary as Vučić vows to step down By Chris Eyte Evangelical leaders in Serbia gave caut...
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