And now for something completely different. A protestant zionist in Israel.

From Israelinsider:

Early this morning (Wednesday, July 26, 2006), I met with nine other men in the new King of Kings Pavilion Prayer Tower high above downtown Jerusalem. On top of our prayer agenda, naturally enough, was the ongoing war that has been triggered by Muslim Arabs bent on destroying the Jewish state.

It is not always easy to know what or how to pray in such circumstances. We know that God's thoughts are not our thoughts nor are our ways His ways, and we do not wish to pray presumptuously. We even have to submit our understanding of what we read in God's Word, the Bible, to His Holy Spirit. Sometimes it is perhaps best to simply pray that Word back to God and, as it were, remind Him of what He has written.

Early in the meeting today Pastor Wayne Hilsden was prompted to read Psalm 83. For those of us living in Israel, this is a well known imprecatory psalm -- one of the "War Psalms."

Part of it reads: For behold, Your enemies make a tumult; and those who hate You have lifted up their head. They have taken crafty counsel against Your people, and consulted together against Your sheltered ones. They have said, "Come, and
let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more." (Psalm 83:2-4)

[I don't know why the schismatics and heretics (and newfangled Catholics) are messing with the Word of God, but that is from Psalm 82:


82:2. O God, who shall be like to thee? hold not thy peace, neither be thou still, O God.
Deus ne taceas ne sileas et non quiescas Deus

82:3. For lo, thy enemies have made a noise: and they that hate thee have lifted up the head.
Quia ecce inimici tui tumultuati sunt et qui oderunt te levaverunt caput

82:4. They have taken a malicious counsel against thy people, and have consulted against thy saints.
Contra populum tuum nequiter tractaverunt et inierunt consilium adversum arcanum tuum

82:5. They have said: Come and let us destroy them, so that they be not a nation: and let the name of Israel be remembered no more.
Dixerunt venite et conteramus eos de gente et non sit memoria nominis Israhel ultra ]

We prayed into it.

Huh? Must be a prod thingee.

Upon returning home two hours later, I found that someone had emailed me a fascinating AP wire report off the CNN website (reprinted in Israel Insider). It was headlined:

"Medieval book of psalms unearthed -- First millennium manuscript, open to Psalm 83, found in Irish mud."

According to the report, the 20-page book, which was found by a construction worker digging in the bog last week, has been expertly dated to the years AD 800 to 1000.

It was the first time in more than 200 years that an early medieval Irish document had been unearthed.

AP quotes the director of the National Museum of Ireland, Pat Wallace, who described the discovery as "really a miracle find."

"There's two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out," Wallace said. "First of all, it's unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing."

What's even more incredible to me is that this book, opened to this psalm, was discovered at this specific time in history.

For right now Israel's enemies are again united in their desire to "cut Israel off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more." They purpose to take for themselves the "pastures of God for a possession." And that they are in league -- or in a confederacy -- is clear.

From Gaza, supported by most of the Arab states, the violence is being directed by the Palestinian Arab terrorist groups: the PLO, Hamas, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front For the Liberation of Palestine and the popular resistance Committees.

In the north, the Lebanese group Hizb'allah, supplied and enabled by Syria and the non-Arab but also Islamic Iran, is raining rockets down on Israel.

This, given the current situation, makes Psalm 83 a fascinating and fitting read, the ancient find nothing short of a phenomenon.

I don't want to take it any further than I should, but time may also show that the discovery of the Irish psalm book was a warning.

Many people have sensed that Damascus could be sucked into this war. Twelve days ago the Islamic Republic of Iran warned that an Israeli strike on Syria would be considered an attack on the whole Islamic world and would elicit a "fierce response."

Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly spelled out his vision for Israel.

"Israel must be wiped off the map." (October 26, 2005)

"The West [must] remove what they created sixty years ago ... [or] the Palestinian nation and other nations will eventually do this for them." (February 11, 2006)

"Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm." (April 15, 2006)

And on July 8, 2006 Ahmadinejad told the foreign ministers of Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Bahrain and Egypt, together with the heads of the Arab League and the Islamic Conference that "all the conditions for the removal of the Zionist regime are at hand.... It won't take long before the wrath of the people turns into a terrible explosion that will wipe the Zionist entity off the map."

Wrote one commentator: None of the foreign ministers present, including Jordan, Egypt or Turkey -- commonly regarded as Israel's friends in the Arab/Muslim world -- objected to the call for annihilation.