The recent hoped for Jewish vote-getter in the Wentworth by-election by P.M. Morrison, to move the Australian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has been said by some commentators to have been a ‘thought bubble’. To me it goes much further than that and is neither political, nor strategic, but a straight out theological manoeuvre and follows on from the same strategy by the current government of the United States. I would say that the USA move is driven by Vice-President Pence and all the other evangelical, born-again, fundamental, charismatic, Pentecostal Christians in the U.S. government. P.M. Morrison is of the same ilk, which many people like to call ‘happy clappers’.

These Christians believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible which I presume is why Morrison refrained from voting in last year’s same sex marriage plebiscite. If pressed, I feel Morrison would answer in the affirmative to a literal six day creation period, an Earth that is approximately 7,000 years old, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve and all the other Hebrew myths and legends that make up the Judeo-Christian Old Testament. It would be a given (to Morrison) that the New Testament is inerrant.

These Christians believe wholeheartedly in the literal, imminent return of Jesus Christ as
stated many times in the New Testament – the ‘second coming’. Mind you, many of the authors of some of the books of the New Testament believed the same thing, stating then that the second coming was ‘at the very doors’. As a teenager in the late ‘50s I attended a Pentecostal church and where we were taught and warned that the second coming was imminent and that we would be ‘raptured’ (the rapture) and caught up in the air to join the hosts of heaven that will return with Jesus.

This return sees Jesus riding on a white horse, wearing a red garment and setting foot on the Mount of Olives (in Jerusalem). The Mount of Olives will ‘split in twain’ and the armies of Israel who have been fighting the invading armies of the Anti-Christ, led by the kings of the north, Gog and Magog, will flee through the gap and be saved from destruction. The invading armies will be destroyed by Jesus and his hosts and Christ will then set up his kingdom with Jerusalem as the capital. Thousands of these types of Christians visit, live in and work in Jerusalem because of this belief. Scott Morrison is such a Christian and I propose that this is the reason he has mooted the move of the Australian embassy.

John Lincolne