Prophecy Sign 1: Restoration of Israel to the Land
Prophecy Sign 1: Restoration of Israel to the Land
Ezekiel 36:24
24 For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land.
Ezekiel 37:11-14
11 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.'
12 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.
13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves and bring you up from them.
14 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.'"
Amos 9:13-15
13 "The days are coming," declares the LORD, "when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman and the planter by the one treading grapes. New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from all the hills.
14 I will bring back my exiled people Israel; they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
15 I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them," says the LORD your God.
The Jews were banished from the Holy Land following the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD. Almost 2000 years later, following Hitler's Holocaust, God brought the Jewish people back into the land and Israel was re-established as a nation on May 14, 1948. This remarkable prophecy is a sure sign God has begun dealing with the nation Israel again, just as God promised.
We Gentiles have been allowed to share in her new covenant spiritual blessings for almost 2000 years. The time has come for the Church to return the favor. As Christians, we should remain in strong support for the “Apple of God’s Eye.”
ISRAEL
Israel - In 70 AD, Roman soldiers put down a rebellion, sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and carried the Jewish people to the farthest corners of the Empire to serve as slaves. They tried to eliminate every trace of the nation of Israel, even renaming the land Palestine in honor of Israel’s historical enemies, the Philistines. The Roman intent was to erase all memory of the nation of Israel forever.
But God had other plans. Thousands of years ago, He foretold the long exile of His people. And He promised to call them from “among the nations” (Ezekiel 39:28), from “the farthest corners of the earth” (Isaiah 11:12), and from “north, south, east, and west” (Psalm 107:3). He promised to welcome the Jewish people home from the lands where they were scattered (Ezekiel 20:34), and He promised to restore them to the land of Israel from distant lands (Jeremiah 30:2, 10). And this is exactly what He did. Every single person on earth is an eyewitness to the modern miracle of Israel. The prophets said that following this restoration, the Messiah will come and set up His everlasting Kingdom (Isaiah 35, Joel 3, Jeremiah 23, Micah 4). In other words, Israel’s existence today is a sign that the Second Coming is near.
Almost 2000 years after the destruction of Jerusalem, following Hitler's Holocaust, God brought the Jewish people back into the land and Israel was re-established as a nation on May 14, 1948. This remarkable prophecy is a sure sign God has begun dealing with the nation Israel again, just as God promised.
For 1,878 years, Christians could not point to the sign of Israel. It didn’t exist. The Jews were not in the land. But today, they are.
SUMMARY: Israel and Jerusalem are the focal points, the epicenter of all end times prophecy. God's plan for Israel is going to change our world. So life changing, he has given us advanced warning to prepare. In 1947 The United Nations General Assembly determined that Palestine should be partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem an independent city. In 1948 The state of Israel declared independence. In 1967 Jewish fighters captured the western part of Jerusalem while Jordanian troops captured the eastern city and Old City.
The Blindness Coming Off the Eyes of the Jewish People
“For I do not want you, brothers and sisters, to be ignorant of this mystery—lest you be wise in your own eyes—that a partial hardening has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in”
(Romans 11:25).
Another astonishing indicator is the phenomena of Jewish people coming to faith in Yeshua all over the world—in numbers not seen since the book of Acts. Through the ministry of Jewish Voice alone, we have seen some 55,000 Jewish people respond to the Gospel since 1999! For more than nineteen centuries, the number of Jews openly professing faith in Yeshua was extremely small, and most were assimilated into the Church. All that changed after 1967. The miraculous return of Jerusalem to the Jewish people sparked a great revival. Often called “The Jesus Movement,” this revival was unique from all previous revivals, as Jews started coming to faith—in significant numbers. The Jesus Movement gave birth to the modern Messianic Movement. Before 1967 there was not a single Messianic Jewish congregation in the world. Today more than 350 Messianic Jewish congregations—nearly 100 in Israel alone—proclaim Messiah with a visibly Jewish witness. And from a trickle over the past 2,000 years, today there are tens of thousands of Jews in the United States who express some level of faith in Yeshua!
In the same way the miraculously restored State of Israel is a visible declaration of divine fulfillment of physical restoration, the Messianic Jewish community is a visible declaration of divine spiritual restoration to all the world. God always keeps His covenants. Satan would like to eradicate the Jewish people, thereby proving God and the Bible untrustworthy, but it will not happen!
God is opening long-blinded eyes and softening thousands of Jewish hearts just as the Scriptures promised. This is an obvious fulfillment of biblical prophecy—and a clear indication that the Last Days are upon us.
Through Jeremiah, God promised Israel a new covenant: “’No longer will each teach his neighbor or each his brother, saying: “Know ADONAI,” for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest.’ It is a declaration of ADONAI. ‘For I will forgive their iniquity, their sin I will remember no more’” (Jeremiah 31:33). At the Last Supper, a Jewish Passover Seder, Yeshua lifted the cup of Redemption and, sharing it, announced it was the cup of the New Covenant in His blood. There is a misconception that all the Jews rejected Jesus. In reality, the entire initial community of faith was Jewish. The Jews took the Gospel to the Gentiles, and eventually the Church became almost entirely Gentile and unrecognizable to the Jewish people. However, we are living in a time of Jewish revival!
In Conclusion
All around us, there are signs that the world is being made ready for Messiah’s return. The most important of these, as we have seen, is the restoration of the people of Israel to a right relationship with God. Do you want to know what’s next? God has promised a glorious salvation for the remnant of Israel!
Then I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication, when they will look toward Me whom they pierced. They will mourn for him as one mourns for an only son and grieve bitterly for him, as one grieves for a firstborn
- Zechariah 12:10
“In that day a spring will be opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and impurity” (Zechariah 13:1).
