The State of Israel will end

The State of Israel will end

 

In addition, there is a prophecy in Saint Luke that commonly has gone undiscussed.  Just the same, it is there.  In fact, it is relevant today.  It is Luke 21:24b: “Jerusalem will be trodden down by the gentiles until the times of the gentiles will be fulfilled.”  What this would mean will be this:  As God chose the Hebrews to rule Jerusalem until the time of the appearance of Christ, so as part of his judgment, the Jews will no longer rule Jerusalem until Judgment Day, gentile nations will, since, as a whole, the Jews have rejected Christ with his salvation, and the Almighty, subsequently, has rejected them.

The English word “trod,” when used by the Old and New Testament in reference to agents or nations doing the action, has the sense of “trample” with malice.  In other words, our Lord did not use the neutral term “rule,” “possess,” or “occupy,” for example, but “trample.”  That is, the gentiles would rule the place, not with fairness and justice, but with oppression, not necessarily with harshness toward their own inhabitants, or toward the residents from other nations, but especially toward the Jews.  Thus as the Romans demolished Jerusalem in 70 A. D., so thereafter there would be another kind of trampling, a political and legal trampling of any Jewish resident, not ruling out physical, bodily harm.

Moreover, this oppression would last until Judgment Day: “until the times of the gentiles will be fulfilled.”  Romans 11:25 uses a similar expression (“until the fulness of the gentiles has come in”) which means “until the full number of gentiles has been converted into the church before Judgment Day.” Indeed, it would not make sense for this prophecy to mean that the gentiles only would rule temporarily, for a few thousand years, for instance, and then the Jews would return to rule for the remainder.

To be sure, P. E. Kretzmann explains this prophecy of the gentiles’ rule in Palestine as meaning “until the end of time.  The Zionist movement of our days is not taken seriously even by the Jews themselves” (P. E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible, New Testament Volume I [Saint Louis:  Concordia, 1921], page 381).  This is how he and others understood this prophecy in 1921.

Yet the Zionists ultimately did receive a legal homeland in Palestine in 1948, and have governed there since.  The gentiles, for example, the Romans, the Turks, and the British, no longer rule there.  With this in mind, then, how could and should this prophecy be understood? For instance, ask a clergyman or a theologian about this prophecy.  What would be his response?

Because of the fact that there is now a Zionist state in Palestine, a churchman would be tempted to confess that he would not know for sure what this prophecy of Christ would mean, both in regard to the “trampling down,” and to the length of time this would involve.  In doing so, he would make a solvable prophecy of the Bible, unsolvable, and a certain prophecy, uncertain.

What would be your response? How could and should you understand this prophecy today?  It could and should be this:  that the current Zionist state of Israel in Palestine is only temporary.  It will not endure until the end of time.  Its brief existence is an exception to the rule, like when the Bible prophesied that the scepter would not depart from Judah until Christ would appear (Genesis 49:10), though it did depart for a time when the Jewish people were taken into exile for seventy years, and Palestine, for all practical purposes, was under Babylonian and Persian rule during this period.

Yet how many clergy and theologians would have the courage to risk their reputations, by stating publicly: “According to Christ’s prophecy, the state of Israel will not last.  It will end”?

The purpose of this prophecy, then, is to warn men until the end of time how severe the Almighty will punish those who would reject his commands and promises by ignoring, thinking little of, doubting, dismissing or despising them as the Jews did, yet how he magnanimously wills that the gentiles should fill his spiritual house before the final day.

Since many of the people rejected him as the pardon-bringing Messiah, the Lord Jesus prophesied the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, and then used his power to accomplish it.

In the future, there may be an attempt to build a third Temple on this site in Jerusalem.  Yet it never will be completed, for God will prevent it. For example, the Roman emperor, Julian the Apostate, defiantly eager to discredit Christ’s prophecy, that the temple in Jerusalem would be reduced to ruin and never rebuilt, spent great sums of money to restore the building, to put this prophecy to shame, and to defy specifically the God of the Bible; but fire and an earthquake frustrated his efforts, and the temple never was built.  In other words, the Almighty sent a miracle to prevent it.

The God then is the same God now. He will never permit a third temple to be built.  Moreover, he will use his power even today to punish or to bless, in accordance as to how a nation would react to his pledge of pardon.  Yet he is overwhelmingly ignored today by politically obsessed men who think only men could rule, not God; that men’s power will determine events, not God; that only men could punish, not God.