01-Prophetic Fulfillment In Our Day
Prophetic Fulfillment In Our Day
CHAPTER ONE No MAN can dispute the fact that the position of the Jews among the nations is without parallel or likeness in the history of mankind.
The Jews were the only people to have had their entire history written 2500 years in advance. Yet for three-quarters of their national existence they have been without independent national life-exiled, scattered-without obliterating a single feature peculiar to them.
Through Jeremiah God declared: “If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever” (Jeremiah 31:36); and Dr. Samuel Kellogg has said:
“There is no influence which might be supposed to tend to the utter extinction of a people which has not been brought to bear upon the Jews with diabolical power through the centuries as upon no other nation in history, yet they are among us today with their national self-consciousness not in the least abated by their age-long experience of exile, scattering and persecution.” When our Lord put a curse upon a useless fig tree (Mark 11:13) leaving it stripped even of leaves, He was undoubtedly acting out a parable with reference to the Jewish people. They made great profession of spiritual fruitfulness, yet had none; therefore, because of their rejection of Him, they have remained spiritually barren through the ages.
NEW SHOOTS ON THE FIG TREE But the Saviour added another lesson concerning the fig tree, when in connection with His prophecy of the end of the present age, “And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree, and all the trees [Israel standing out prominently among all the nations] When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own selves that summer is now at hand.”
When Israel shall begin to bud forth nationally, at a time when there is an intensified nationalism in the world, we may know that the Golden Age is not far off. “When the Lord shall build up Zion He shall appear in His glory” (Psalms 102:16)
It cannot be denied that since the initiation of Zionism, Israel has been shooting out branches. The Jews in Palestine are even now suffering the birth pangs of a new nation in which they will one day dwell together again, ending their wanderings.
Whether one will believe the Bible or not, the fact is that in literal accord with its prophecies:
- The waste places of Palestine are being planted,
- The land is becoming fruitful after many centuries of barrenness.
- The ancient cities are being rebuilt,
- The people are being regathered;
- The stage is surely being set for a time of trouble such as foretold.
Leaders of the nations have expressed the feeling that Palestine will become the cockpit of a great world conflagration. As Bishop Horseley has said: “One who denies that the Scriptures are being fulfilled is either a baby in prophecy or a giant in effrontery.”
“ALL THINGS MORTAL BUT THE JEW”
Mark Twain, who remarked that “All things are mortal but the Jew,” could not understand the secret of their immortality, but the student of Bible prophecy has the answer.
The prophecies furnish us the only explanation of why this people, scattered throughout the centuries, divided in their thinking, with no ruler, no unified worship, persecuted, hunted and hated-cannot be assimilated and cannot be destroyed.
They are destined to be on earth as a nation when the Messiah, who was delivered unto death by their forefathers, returns to establish His worldwide rule.
Strange to say, the Jews, in blindness toward their own Scriptures, cannot understand their own survival as a people. Typical of much expressed by their leaders, The American Hebrew said:
“Surely there must be at work positive forces, the nature of which is as baffling today as it was thousands of years ago, forces which have achieved the unity of the Jewish people against its own will and against its own inclination toward self-liquidation, forces that have denied the will of a hostile world determined to disperse and exterminate it, forging a steel chain of indestructibility about it. It is therefore not possible to explain the physical survival of the Jews.” In the same vein The Jewish Daily Bulletin said in an editorial:
“The phenomenon of Jewish survival remains completely incomprehensible and no historian has yet arisen who can explain why, under the hammer blows of its long and extraordinary history, the Jewish people has not been shattered. Every rational explanation offered on the basis of historical events proves unsatisfactory.” THE ONLY EXPLANATION - THE BIBLE
But, read Deuteronomy 28 or Leviticus 26 and consider God’s forecast of their entire history to this very hour. Here the people were warned that if they turned their backs upon the exalted spiritual privileges given them, they should become an astonishment, a proverb and a byword among the nations. Wherever they should be scattered, they would be unable to find rest, their lives ever hanging in doubt. Their land should be brought into desolation after desolation and one trouble after another should pursue them through the ages. “And yet, for all that . . . I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them utterly, and to break my covenant with them.” The promise is that eventually their eyes should be opened and the covenant of the land should be fulfilled.
These words prove the divine inspiration of the Bible. Other scattered people are quickly assimilated, but the Jew will remain a Jew to the end. God is not through with the Jew, for, after passing through the predicted Great Tribulation “The LORD shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face.” The Lord will establish them in the land of their fathers, a holy people unto Himself. No wonder Dr. Panton says: “Behold the Jew and believe your Bible!” Who but God, centuries before these events occurred, could have given us such a detailed and perfect foreview of this unique people? THE WHOLE WORLD JEW-CONSCIOUS
What has suddenly brought the Jews to the front? Why have they for some years been holding the front pages of the newspapers? Through the long centuries Palestine lay waste and barren. Half starving Turks and Arabs struggled for an existence in a land without water. Progress was impossible. In 1895, Theodore Hertzl, moved largely by the case of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jew who was framed by anti-Semites, started an undertaking to get persecuted Jews into settlements in Palestine. Baron de Rothschild, who was known as the father of Palestine colonization, began using his millions to buy up land in Palestine for communal centers.
In this connection, an article which appeared in The Sunday School Times in 1918, will be of interest. The paper published an article on “Zionism and Its Realization,” by Elisho M. Friedman, secretary of the University of Zionist Society of New York. This prominent Jew said:
“A well known Christian layman, William E. Blackstone, antedated Theodore Hertzl by five years in the advocacy of the re-establishment of a Jewish state. His memorial to President Harrison in 1891 was signed by churchmen, editors and makers of public opinion. It reflects keen social foresight upon the part of the initiator, Mr. Blackstone and his collaborators.”
However, it was not “keen social foresight” which led this beloved student of prophecy to write of such a movement. It was a discernment of the times together with a rich knowledge of the prophetic Word.
WHY WAS THE WORLD WAR FOUGHT? When came the crisis of the World War and it appeared that Germany was about to sweep into London, there came forward a British Jew, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, a noted chemist of the University of Manchester. He offered to his government his discovery of a powerful chemical, Acetone, for use in the manufacture of explosives. He asked no money for his discovery, but only that, should the Allies win, the British government would use its influence to open Palestine to persecuted Jews. Said Lord Balfour: “If the Allies win, you shall have your Palestine.”
Meantime German planes flew over London, carrying terrible gas bombs, the invention of a German Jewish chemist, Dr. Fritz Haber. Haber also discovered the nitrogen fixation process which made Germany independent of foreign nitrates and able to enter the war in 1914. He was a Nobel Prize winner because of his scientific accomplishments.
While the German Chief-of-Staff Ludendorff, a Jew hater, delayed in making further use of this deadly gas, the Allies suddenly came against them with the new TNT and they were driven back. Nazis now blame the Jews for the loss of the War.
Dr. Haber, although he had contributed to Germany some of its greatest inventions, was driven out of Germany by the Nazis. He died in Switzerland, in 1935. A library was there dedicated to his memory, the exercises being conducted by none other than the British chemist, Dr. Weizmann, who in the meantime had become President of the World Zionist Movement.
Why was the World War fought? It undoubtedly marked the beginning of the end of “the times of the Gentiles” and the beginning of the building up of Zion.
Men in their ignorance of the prophetic Word may devise schemes for the partitioning of Palestine; the Jews for the sake of getting a foothold in the land, along with recognition as a nation, may accept some such plan, but God has clearly spoken. He has reserved one strip of land for Israel. There is every reason to believe that ere long Palestine shall be in fact “Eretz Israel.”