|
Countdown to 6000
|
| Home | Angels |
Diet
|
Doctrine
|
Family Devotions
|
Happy, Joyous & Free
|
Money
|
Prayer | Prophecy | Spirituality |
Chapter 11: The Restoration Of Israel
During the time of Christ’s ministry on Earth he explained to his disciples the meaning of many prophetic scriptures concerning himself from many different books of the Old Testament. He taught them from the books of Moses, the Psalms, and the prophets. In doing so, he showed us that just as the prophecies concerning the events leading up to and during his first coming were scattered throughout the scriptures, so also the events leading up to his second coming need to be gathered from many different books of the bible. The books of Ezekiel, Daniel, the Psalms, the gospels, the letters of Paul, and Revelation contain the bulk of the prophecies concerning Christ’s second coming. In the book of Ezekiel, there is a description of events that will occur in the end times. There are different opinions as to whether the prophecies in Ezekiel chapters thirty seven through thirty nine will occur before, during or after the Great Tribulation. During the course of this study we will look at these prophecies with the view that the war described in chapters thirty eight and thirty nine will begin to be fulfilled about six months after Antichrist makes his peace pact with Israel, but the timing is not a certainty. The first event predicted in Ezekiel chapter thirty seven is the regathering of the Jews and the Israelites who have been scattered over the face of the whole Earth. The prophecies below concern both the resurrection of the dead and the return of the Israelites to their own land. Ezekiel 37:1-14 The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, "Son of man, can these bones live?" I said, "O Sovereign LORD, you alone know." Then he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.'" So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, "Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe into these slain, that they may live.'" So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet--a vast army. Then he said to me: "Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, 'Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.' Therefore prophesy and say to them: 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: O my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the LORD have spoken, and I have done it, declares the LORD.'" In the ancient past, before the first coming of Christ, the Israelites had divided themselves into two nations, (God split the kingdom under Solomon’s son Rehoboam) and fought wars with each other. The northern nation was called Israel, and the southern nation was called Judah. The northern nation was punished by God for worshipping idols and God permitted the king of Assyria to take them into captivity carry them away to northern regions of the Assyrian empire. From there the Israelites migrated throughout the world. Their captivity began in 721 BC and they have never returned to the land of Israel. The southern kingdom, called Judah, also sinned against the Lord, and he (the Lord) caused the king of Babylon to take them into captivity and carry them to Babylon. This occurred in 586 BC. It was in Babylon that the book of the prophet Daniel was written. After seventy years God caused the king of the Persians, Cyrus, to issue a decree permitting the Jews living in Babylon to return to their own land. They did so, and their descendants were those Jews who were living in Israel during the time of the first coming of Christ. In seventy AD, about thirty five years after Christ was crucified, the Roman armies destroyed Jerusalem and the temple and drove the Jews out of the land that God had given them. God scattered the Jews throughout the world because of their sins. They remained scattered without a country to come home to until 1948 when the state of Israel was reborn. Ezekiel 37:15-28 The word of the LORD came to me: "Son of man, take a stick of wood and write on it, 'Belonging to Judah and the Israelites associated with him.' Then take another stick of wood, and write on it, 'Ephraim's stick, belonging to Joseph and all the house of Israel associated with him.' Join them together into one stick so that they will become one in your hand. "When your countrymen ask you, 'Won't you tell us what you mean by this?' say to them, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I am going to take the stick of Joseph-- which is in Ephraim's hand--and of the Israelite tribes associated with him, and join it to Judah's stick, making them a single stick of wood, and they will become one in my hand.' Hold before their eyes the sticks you have written on and say to them, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will take the Israelites out of the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land. I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms. They will no longer defile themselves with their idols and vile images or with any of their offenses, for I will save them from all their sinful backsliding, and I will cleanse them. They will be my people, and I will be their God. "'My servant David will be king over them, and they will all have one shepherd. They will follow my laws and be careful to keep my decrees. They will live in the land I gave to my servant Jacob, the land where your fathers lived. They and their children and their children's children will live there forever, and David my servant will be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant. I will establish them and increase their numbers, and I will put my sanctuary among them forever. My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people. Then the nations will know that I the LORD make Israel holy, when my sanctuary is among them forever.'" (Zec 12:7 NKJV) "The LORD will save the tents of Judah first, so that the glory of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem shall not become greater than that of Judah. The fulfillment of this prophecy is in progress today. The Lord is continuously gathering more and more Jews and Israelites to the land of Israel. After he finishes gathering the Jews and opens their eyes to recognize Jesus Christ as their savior, then he will regather the rest of the Israelites and open their eyes also. The prophet Jeremiah also spoke of this event. Jeremiah 16:14-15 "However, 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. The nation of Israel today is a nation that has survived and recovered from four wars. In each war they were vastly outnumbered and from a human viewpoint, they should have been defeated each time, but instead God gave them victory and increased their territory. The Arab-Israeli Wars
Since the United Nations partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, there have been four major Arab-Israeli wars and numerous intermittent battles. THE FIRST PALESTINE WAR (1947-49)
The first war began as a civil conflict between Palestinian Jews and Arabs following the United Nations recommendation of Nov. 29, 1947, to partition Palestine, then still under British mandate, into an Arab state and a Jewish state. Fighting quickly spread as Arab guerrillas attacked Jewish settlements to prevent implementation of the UN plan. After the British had departed and the state of Israel had been established on May 15, 1948, the Palestine Arab forces and foreign volunteers were joined by regular armies of Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, with token support from Saudi Arabia. By January 1949, when the last battles ended, Israel had extended its frontiers by about 1,930 sq. mi. beyond the 4,983 sq. mi. allocated to the Jewish state in the UN partition resolution. It had also secured its independence. SUEZ-SINAI WAR (1956)
The war began on Oct. 29, 1956, after an announcement that the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were to be integrated under the Egyptian commander in chief. Israel's Operation Kadesh, commanded by Moshe Dayan, lasted less than a week; its forces reached the eastern bank of the Suez Canal in about 100 hours, seizing the Gaza Strip and nearly all the Sinai Peninsula. The war was halted by a UN General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal of all occupying forces from Egyptian territory. Israel, however, delayed withdrawal, insisting that it receive security guarantees against further Egyptian attack. After several additional UN resolutions calling for withdrawal and after pressure from the United States, Israel's forces left in March 1957. SIX-DAY WAR (1967)
By 1967 the Arab confrontation states--Egypt, Syria, and Jordan-- became impatient with the status quo, the propaganda war with Israel escalated, and border incidents increased dangerously. At the end of May, Egypt and Jordan signed a new defense pact placing Jordan's armed forces under Egyptian command. Efforts to de-escalate the crisis were of no avail. Believing that war was inevitable, Israeli Premier Levi Eshkol, Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, and Army Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin approved preemptive Israeli strikes at Egyptian, Syrian, Jordanian, and Iraqi airfields on June 5, 1967. By the evening of June 6, Israel had destroyed the combat effectiveness of the major Arab air forces, destroying more than 400 planes and losing only 26 of its own. Israel also swept into Sinai, reaching the Suez Canal and occupying most of the peninsula in less than four days. King Hussein of Jordan rejected an offer of neutrality and opened fire on Israeli forces in Jerusalem on June 5. But a lightning Israeli campaign placed all of Arab Jerusalem and the Jordanian West Bank in Israeli hands by June 8. As the war ended on the Jordanian and Egyptian fronts, Israel opened an attack on Syria in the North. In a little more than two days of fierce fighting, Syrian forces were driven from the Golan Heights, from which they had shelled Jewish settlements across the border. The Six-Day War ended on June 10 when the UN negotiated cease-fire agreements on all fronts. The Six-Day War increased severalfold the area under Israel's control. Through the occupation of Sinai, Gaza, Arab Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Golan Heights, Israel shortened its land frontiers with Egypt and Jordan, removed the most heavily populated Jewish areas from direct Arab artillery range, and temporarily increased its strategic advantages. OCTOBER WAR (1973) (ALSO CALLED THE YOM KIPPUR
WAR)
Israel was the dominant military power in the region for the next six years. Between 1967 and 1973, Arab leaders repeatedly warned that they would not accept continued Israeli occupation of the lands lost in 1967. After Anwar al-Sadat succeeded Nasser as president of Egypt in 1970, threats about "the year of decision" were more frequent, as was periodic massing of troops along the Suez Canal. Egyptian and Syrian forces underwent massive rearmament with the most sophisticated Soviet equipment. Sadat consolidated war preparations in secret agreements with President Hafez al-Assad of Syria for a joint attack and with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia to finance the operations. Egypt and Syria attacked on Oct. 6, 1973, pushing Israeli forces several miles behind the 1967 cease-fire lines. Israel was thrown off guard, partly because the attack came on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the most sacred Jewish religious day. In counterattacks on the Egyptian front, Israel seized a major bridgehead behind the Egyptian lines on the west bank of the canal. In the North, Israel drove a wedge into the Syrian lines, giving it a foothold a few miles west of Damascus. After 18 days of fighting in the longest Arab-Israeli war since 1948, hostilities were again halted by the UN. The costs were the greatest in any battles fought since World War II. The Arabs lost some 2,000 tanks and more than 500 planes; the Israelis, 804 tanks and 114 planes. The 3-week war cost Egypt and Israel about $7 billion each, in material and losses from declining industrial production or damage. The political phase of the 1973 war ended with disengagement agreements accepted by Israel, Egypt, and Syria after negotiations in 1974 and 1975 by U.S. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Under the terms of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty signed on Mar. 26, 1979, Israel returned the Sinai peninsula to Egypt. Hopes for an expansion of the peace process to include other Arab nations waned, however, when Egypt and Israel were subsequently unable to agree on a formula for Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Software Toolworks Encyclopedia Copyright 1992. We can see from history that just as God promised, Israel would be a nation that has recovered from war. Though they have recovered from four wars so far, there are at least three more in their future, and maybe more. Those that will occur for certain in the future are, (1) the war described in Ezekiel, (2) the battle of Armageddon, and (3) the war at the end of the Millennium. |