The Permanency of Israel
Introduction: In addition to Mother’s Day it is also the 58th anniversary of the re-birth of the state of Israel in Palestine.
Mother’s Day Application: The only time in the Bible that Jesus Christ ever likened himself to a Mother is recorded in Matthew 23:37 as he looks over the holy City, the city of the great King that he is destined to rule over, following the Jews final rejection of his kingdom,
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!
Momma’s crossed-stiched “Apple of my eye,” picture. That term actually comes from the scripture and it was originally used to describe God’s relationship to Israel (Deut 32:10, Zech 2:8). That was God’s designation for Israel 3500 years ago when he called them out to be a holy nation and on God’s part that sentiment has never changed.
Why are the Jews even important to individual Christians?
- Salvation is of the Jews. (John 4:22)
- The oracles of God were committed to the Jew. (Rom 3:2)
The Permanency of Israel
Text: Malachi 3:6
The rhetoric has been turned up in recent months and years concerning Israel, and the nations of the earth are seemingly positioning themselves against Israel. You have in the last six months the election of a terrorist organization coming to power in the Palestinian Authority, an organization with the absolute destruction of the state of Israel written into their organizing charter. This same government wants to operate an independent state alongside Israel.
At the same time Iranian President Mahmoud Amadinejahd, the same guy that is adamantly protecting his nations rights and ability to have nuclear technology, is saying that Israel must be wiped off the map. Russia and China are tying the hands of the diplomatic efforts at work to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat. A top Iranian general announced publicly two weeks ago that in the case the United States did pursue military action against Israel they would be prompted immediately to attack Israel.
It appears that Israel’s window of effective self-defense is quickly closing with the Russian Tor air Missile Defense system slated to be activated in the country of Iran by September.
Desperate defensive measures such as the Samson option are presently on the table for the Israeli military. Many an unsaved news analyst has commented on the hopelessness of the scenario and we might be apt to anticipate the end of this nation if we didn’t know that fate of the nation of Israel has been sealed by almighty God and confirmed in the prophetic pages of a book God wrote. Israel will yet be the head of the nations as God promised in Deut 28:13, under a perfect Kingdom ruled the King of kings and the Lord of lords, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus the Christ.
From Israel’s very beginning Satan has been absolutely obsessed with her destruction. The Bible bears out this story and where the Bible leaves off of this dramatic ordeal even secular history reflects the Devil’s full-out attack on God’s chosen people. Allow me to give you an overview of the persecution the Jewish people have endured.
- They were enslaved for over 400 years at the hands of the Pharoahs in Exodus.
- They are harassed incessantly by Gentile nations throughout the book of Judges.
- They were oppressed by Sennacharib in 2 Kings 19.
- They were massacred by Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian army in Lamentations.
- A.D. 70 The Roman Army destroys Jerusalem killing over 1 million Jews and taking another 100,000 into slavery and captivity.
- A.D. 113 Jews in Cyprus, Cyrene, Egypt, and Mesopotamia attempt a revolt resulting in the death of several hundred thousand Jews.
- A.D. 132 Another revolt attempted resulting in the ultimate dispersion of the Jews to the four-corners of the earth by the Roman Emperor Hadrian, at the same time that about 500,000 Jews were killed and thousands were sold into slavery.
- The next several hundred years worth of so-called Christian History is laced with anti-Semitism including the burning of synagogues, new laws against Jews meeting publicly or holding public office, and forced baptisms
- A.D. 613 Catholic Spain forced its Jewish citizens to either convert or leave the country.
- A.D. 855 Jews were exiled from Italy.
- A.D. 1096 In the midst of the Crusade European soldiers confronted Jews saying, ‘Christ-killers, embrace the cross or die.’ 12,000 Jews in the Rhine River Valley during the first Crusade alone. (There were nine.)
- A.D. 1180 Phillip Augustus, King of France, arbitrarily seized all Jewish property and expelled the Jews.
- A.D. 1290 About 16,000 Jews were exiled from England.
- A.D. 1298 Jews in Austria, Bavaria, and Franconia were persecuted severely resulting in the destruction of 140 Jewish communities and 100,000 Jews killed in just 6 months.
- A.D. 1306 In France 100,000 Jews were exiled.
- A.D. 1347 After being blamed for the Black plague well over 20,000 Jews were murdered in Europe.
- A.D. 1394 The Jews were exiled from France for the second time.
- A.D. 1492 Jews in Spain were once again forced to convert to Catholicism or leave. 300,000 were exiled.
- A.D. 1497 Same thing in Portugal. 20,000 left rather than be baptized.
- A.D. 1540 Jews were exiled from Naples.
- A.D. 1550 Jews were exiled from Genoa and Venice.
- A.D. 1582 Jews are expelled from Holland.
- A.D. 1648 Jewish uprising against Polish rule in Ukraine results in 100,000 Jews murdered and 300 communities destroyed.
- 1846-78 All Jews within the Vatican state, under rule of Pope Pius IX were confined to ghettos.
- 1917 Following the Bulshevik Revolution 200,000 Jews were murdered in Ukraine alone.
- 1940 France collaborated with Nazi German deporting 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps, of which only about 2,500 would survive.
- 1943 The Nazi leadership determine the solution to the Jewish question was to exterminate every Jew in Europe. By the time the Holocaust was broken up in 1945 around 6 million Jews (1.5 million of them children) were tortured, shot, gassed, and cremated to death.
Moses didn’t know it when he stood on that holy ground at Mount Horeb on the backside of the dessert, but the burning bush he was looking at would be the finest picture of the permanency and indestructibility of his people ever given to us in the word of God. That nation is ever burning, yet never consumed.
3500 years of pogroms, inquisitions, concentration camps, and ethnic cleansing couldn’t polish off God’s chosen people.
Did you know that Israel is the only ancient people group still on planet earth. And what’s more than that, they’re speaking the ancient language that God gave them in the land that God gave them.
Anyone ever met a Jew before? Who’s met a Babylonian, Hittite, Hivitte, Jebusite, Canaanite, Amorites, Moabites, or Philistine?
Now I’m a supporter of Israel and I’m going to preach that you ought to support Israel, but I’m not under the impression that the nation of Israel is above reproach a perfect little angel that escaped the blot of sin that’s visited the rest of mankind.
- If a Jew bypasses the cross of Jesus Christ in this dispensation of Grace he goes to the same lake of fire a lost Gentiles goes to.
- When the Jews chose Barabbas to be delivered up instead of Jesus Christ nearly 2000 years ago the Jews troubles were just getting started. Much of the list that I just went through can be attributed directly back to Matthew 27:25 when all the people answered Pilate saying, His blood be upon us and on our children.
Chastening must come. But the Lord stated of Israel in Isaiah 54:7, For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee.
Israel’s troubles are far from done, in fact the worst is yet to come in the time of Jacob’s trouble, but God has been setting a seen in the Middle East to glorify Himself in Israel in a way that He’s never done before.
The first step in doing this is the restoration of Israel,
Ezekiel 36:24
24 For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.
Amos 9:14-15
And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them.
And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God.
The first captivity returned to the land with Ezra and Zerubabel and Amos prophesies they would come back the second time. They weren’t scattered completely the second time until A.D. 70. As of 1917 there were about 25,000 Jews in Palestine.
The scene was prophesied in Isaiah 11:10-12
And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.
And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea.
And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.
(In 1948 following the close of World War II retired US and British surplus planes flew around the various Arab countries surrounding the Holy Land, through the desert flying in from the east, and for the first time under one ‘ensign,’ that of the United Nations and they brought 600,000 Jews from 81 countries speaking 79 different languages to their homeland just as God predicted some 2500 years earlier.)
Isaiah 43:5-6
Fear not: for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east,
- Prior to independence only about 10% of those Jews that returned came from the Orient, by 1953, half of the Jews going back into the land came from the east.
and gather thee from the west;
- Thousands of Jews from Europe, the US, and even Latin America rushed to get back to their homeland.
I will say to the north, Give up;
- In the years following Israel’s independence hundred’s of thousands of Russian Jews made it back to Israel as Communism failed.
and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth;
- Years after Israel’s independence DC-4’s were chartered for massive air lifts of Jews from places such as Yemen and Ethiopia. These primitive Jewish people had never even seen an airplane. When they were asked if they were scared to ride in a plane having never seen one they said they were not. They had fully expected to be carried to Israel “by eagles wings,” as in Exod 19:4