Limapela Education Project
Faith in Action
This project aims to provide quality education to children in Zambia's Copperbelt Province.
For some Christians, Israel can do no wrong. For others, Israel is the villain of the Middle East. Greyfriars’ Senior Minister Rob Yule takes a more considered view, seeing the return of the Jewish people to their land, after nineteen centuries of exile, as one of the great events of modern times. Rob shows how the regathering of Israel fulfils a number of specific biblical prophecies, and must therefore be of greater significance than a merely human or political phenomenon. Rob gave this message at Greyfriars’ morning service on 7 May 2006, just as the number of Jews in Israel surpassed those in the United States for the first time.
We have just passed a significant milestone. On the eve of its 58th Independence Day celebrations (3 May), Israel’s population reached 7.03 million, including 5.64 million Jews. This means that more Jews now live in Israel than in the United States (5.3 million). It is the first time since their dispersal in the first century that more Jews live in Israel than in any other country.
The return of the Jewish people to their land, after nineteen centuries of exile, is one of the great events of modern times. The first Jews began returning to Israel and establishing settlements in the 1880s – the beginnings of the Zionist movement. The state of Israel was reborn in 1948, rising like a Phoenix out of the ashes of the Holocaust. The old city of Jerusalem came back under Jewish control for the first time in nineteen centuries after its capture in the Six Day War of 1967.
No other nation has been twice destroyed and twice restored. No other nation has had its language die out then come back into everyday use. The regathering of the Jews is the subject of many biblical prophecies. These prophecies are so precise that we can be in no doubt that this event is being brought about by God himself. There are divine finger prints all over it. Some Christians try to deny any contemporary significance in these events, claiming that these prophecies were fulfilled in the return of the Jews from their first exile in Babylon, as described in the Old Testament. But there are features in these prophecies that were never fulfilled in biblical times, and fit exactly what is happening today.
Isaiah prophesies that the Jews will come back a second time. ‘In that day the Lord will reach out his hand a second time to reclaim the remnant that is left of his people.’ (Isaiah 11:11). The first time was the return from Babylon under Nehemiah and Ezra in the 5th century BCE. The second time is what is happening today.
The Jews from Babylon returned to Israel from the east. Biblical prophecy tells us that one day Jews will return from all points of the compass. ‘Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bring your children from the east and gather you from the west. I will say to the north, “Give them up!” and to the south, “Do not hold them back.” Bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth.’ (Isaiah 43:5-6).
‘See, they will come from afar — some from the north, some from the west, some from the region of Aswan’. (Isaiah 49:12). The word translated ‘Aswan’ is Sinim in the Hebrew text. In modern Hebrew it means ‘China’. Yes, there are Jews in China! My theology professor in Edinburgh, Thomas F. Torrance, was born of missionary parents in a remote part of southwest China where there was a community of Jews who had maintained their identity for two and a half thousand years.
‘ “The days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when men will no longer say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of Egypt,’ but they will say, ‘As surely as the LORD lives, who brought the Israelites up out of the land of the north and out of all the countries where he had banished them.’ For I will restore them to the land I gave their forefathers.” ’ (Jeremiah 16:14-15).
What is the ‘land of the north’? If you look at an atlas you will find that Moscow is north of Israel. This prophecy foretells a regathering of Jews so significant that it will cause them to forget their Exodus from Egypt. Between 1990 and 2003, following the dramatic collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union, more than 1.1 million Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel. Many of these were well-educated, leading to a joke I heard in 1991, that the streets of Tel Aviv looked better, now that they were being cleaned by doctors!
Some prophecies, like this last one, refer to particular countries. Indeed, the first prophecy I quoted continues, ‘In that day the Lord will reach out his hand a second time to reclaim the remnant that is left of his people from Assyria, from Lower Egypt, from Upper Egypt, from Cush, from Elam, from Babylonia, from Hamath and from the islands of the sea.’ (Isaiah 11:11).
‘Assyria’ is modern Iraq, from where more than 120,000 Jews were brought to Israel, via Cyprus, by air and sea, in ‘Operation Ezra and Nehemiah’, in 1950-1951, after the War of Independence. ‘Cush’ is the Upper Nile region, from where the Falashas or black Jews of Ethiopia have returned so dramatically to Israel in recent times. Not long before my 1991 trip to Israel, ‘Operation Solomon’ brought 14,400 black Jews from Ethiopia to Israel, on 40 flights in a secret 36-hour airlift – setting a world record of 1,069 passengers on single jumbo jet in the process.
Jeremiah and Amos envisage a permanent return from exile. This could not refer to the Jews who returned from Babylon, for their descendants were cruelly exiled by the Romans in AD 70, the beginning of the modern Diaspora or dispersion of Jews among the nations. ‘I will plant them, and not uproot them.’ (Jeremiah 24:6). ‘I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them.’ (Amos 9:15). Jerusalem ‘shall never again be uprooted or overthrown.’ (Jeremiah 31:40).
These are amazing promises. Perhaps you do not realise what a miracle the survival of the modern state of Israel is. The armies of six Arab states attacked Israel on the very first day of its existence, 14 May 1948. Not until the famous triple handshake on the White House lawn in March 1979 between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and American President Jimmy Carter, did the nation of Israel gain a single day of official peace. To this day only Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel. 58 years later all the other surrounding Arab nations, with a combined population of over 150 million, are still technically at war with the tiny Jewish state.
Most amazing of all was Israel’s survival, against all odds, in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. On the holiest fast day of the Jewish year Egypt attacked with a withering barrage of shell-fire across the Suez Canal, and Syria advanced on the Golan Heights with 1200 tanks on a thirty kilometre front – more tanks than the Germans used in their entire blitzkreig against Russia in 1941. How Israel survived against such odds is truly amazing.
One cannot help feeling that this hatred of the Jews is so wicked and persistent that it is demonically inspired, but God promises to protect them.
New research by two German historians has shown that Hitler planned to extend the Holocaust to the Middle East. They discovered that in 1942 the Nazis created a special mobile SS death squad to liquidate Jews in British-mandate Palestine. It was formed after the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, visited Hitler in Berlin and offered his services to the Third Reich. The squad was attached to Rommel’s Africa Korps and was waiting in Athens for when the British were driven from the Middle East. So when Field Marshall Montgomery broke Rommel’s advance at El Alamein, it was not only a decisive turning point in the Second World War. He saved the yishuv, the Jews of Palestine.
Last year, just after becoming President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’, dismissed the Holocaust as ‘a myth’, and demanded that Israel to be relocated to Germany, Canada or Alaska. Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been widely reported. Less reported has been Iran’s acquisition, in April, of Russian-made missiles from North Korea with a range of 2,500 kilometres. That puts most of Europe, as well as Israel and the Middle East, within Iran’s range. Last Tuesday an Iranian general warned that if the United States strikes Iran’s nuclear facilities, ‘the first place we target will be Israel’.
God promises to defend Israel against this persistent and irrational hatred: ‘No weapon forged against you will prevail.’ (Isaiah 54:17).
God also promises to make Israel a blessing. Let me share a testimony from a woman from my previous church that I received while I was preparing this message:
‘Nearly 20 years ago I asked the Lord a question about Church. I had been a Christian for several years and loved meeting with other believers. Like most of us though, it didn’t take long to realise the Church wasn’t really at the place or in the relationship it should be with the Lord, or the people always with each other. So of course my question was an obvious one to ask, “What Lord is the best way to help the Church be all it should be?”
‘I was expecting an answer along the lines of evangelism but interestingly he didn’t speak of crusades and public meetings or any of the expected outreach activities. He spoke of the blessing of the Jewish people through two verses of Scripture I had not seen before: “For if their (the Jewish people’s) rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?” (Romans 11:15). And of the Jewish people I read: “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you I will curse; and all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3). How was the Church to be blessed of the Lord? Answer: Through Israel.’
Soon God brought this woman into an intercessory ministry for Israel and the Jewish people. She says, ‘My life has never been the same since.’ In 1988 she went to an international prayer conference in Jerusalem. There she met a businessman named Gustav Scheller, a travel agent who later founded the Ebenezer Emergency Fund to help transport Jews back to Israel, especially from the former Soviet Union. He appointed this woman as his New Zealand representative. To date Ebenezer has assisted over 100,000 Soviet Jews to return Israel.
We are living in momentous days. God is preparing the world for the return of Jesus. Jesus taught us that we need to recognise the ‘signs of the times’. When these things begin to take place, he said, we are not to be afraid, but to be confident and ‘lift up our heads’, because ‘our redemption is drawing near’. (Luke 21:28).
Rob Yule, 7 May 2006
© 2006, Greyfriars Presbyterian Church
