Chapter 7 - The Repentance Of Israel
An important but sadly neglected factor in the
stirring events associated with the return of the Lord is the necessary
repentance of his people. In the minds of many it has been too often tacitly
assumed that the coming of their King in glory will bring about a
national repentance in Israel. Probably this is a somewhat uncertain inference
from the familiar words of Zechariah 12:10: “They shall look upon me whom
they pierced, and they shall mourn for him as one mourneth for his only
son”. The change of pronouns “me . . . him” very subtly
suggests the divine character of the one who had been pierced but who now
appears in glory: “The house of David shall be as God, as the angel of the
Lord before them” (v. 8).
It is vitally important, however, to recognize
that the actual repentance of Israel is represented in an impressive mass of
Bible passages as a necessary prelude to the coming of Christ. His return
to the earth will not happen until the Jews turn to the God of their
fathers in faith and importunity.
From the earliest days of their history this has
been the reiterated burden of the prophets that there can be no divine
deliverance apart from repentance. This is the necessary and sufficient
condition for salvation, whether it be individual or national:
If they shall confess their iniquity, and the
iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me,
and that also they have walked contrary to me . . . Then I will remember my
covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with
Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the Land (Leviticus 26:40-42). And
it shall come to pass, when all these things shall come upon thee . . . and thou
shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath
driven thee, and shalt return to the Lord thy God . . . that then the Lord thy
God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and
gather thee from all the nations . . . (Deuteronomy 30:1-3).
The same essential truth is emphasized yet again
in a powerful eloquent petition in Solomon’s dedicatory prayer in the new
temple (1 Kings 8: 44-53). The entire passage should be studied in all its
impressive detail.
Here, then, is the principle upon which God has
declared that He will work in His dealings with His chosen people. Through all
their colourful history it has been illustrated over and over again. The book of
Judges is one long series of variations on the theme. Yet the present-day
restoration of Israel, after one of the most ghastly experiences in their
history, appears to have been achieved without any real sign of contrition or
godliness. Sad to say, the modern state of Israel has been built on fanatical
human endeavour and incredibly clever human contrivance. Admission of guilt
before God and prayers for His pardon are not an outstanding characteristic of
modern Jewish life.
Then is not the inference inevitable that the
present re-construction of national Israel is without the blessing of God and
must inevitably crash into ruin? Can God permanently bless that which ignores
His control and indeed denies His very existence?
Before Israel can be truly restored to
God’s favour, and experience the happiness of Messiah’s reign, there
must be a willingness to acknowledge the divine law and also to say:
“Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the
Lord”.
Prophet and apostle combine in their emphasis on
this necessary principle. Jeremiah has two majestic passages where the reign of
the promised Messiah is made conditional on Israel’s
repentance:
Return, O backsliding children, saith the Lord .
. . and I will take you one of the city and two of a family (the wholesome
minority in Israel?), and I will bring you to Zion; and I will give you
shepherds according to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and
understanding . . . At that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the
Lord, and all the nations shall be gathered unto it to the name of the
Lord.
Again the entire passage—Jeremiah 3: 12-19
should be studied.
Jeremiah 4:1, 2 has the same basic
message:
If thou wilt put away thine abominations out of
my sight, if thou shalt not remove, if thou shalt swear, The Lord
liveth, in truth, in judgement, and in righteousness; then shall the
nations bless themselves in him, and in him shall they glory. (Corrected
translation)
The apostle Peter’s appeal to Jerusalem was
the same:
Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your
sins may be blotted out . . . and that he may send Jesus the Messiah
which before was preached unto you (Acts 3:19, 20 RV).
The clear meaning of the Greek text makes Jewish
repentance a necessary condition of the coming of Christ—even as he
himself plainly declared: “I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth
till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord
(Matthew 23: 39)”.
Paul’s argument in Romans 11 stated almost
like a proportion sum in arithmetic, requires the same conclusion: “For if
the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the
receiving of them be, but life from the dead9” (11:15); i.e. as the
consequence of Israel’s rejection of the Christ has been the preaching of
the gospel to the Gentiles, so also the repentance of Israel will bring the
resurrection (at the coming of the Lord).
Add to the lengthy evidence already cited such
other Scriptures as Zephaniah 2:3, Isaiah 59:20, Amos 5:15, Psalms 81:13, 14,
Zechariah 6:15, and it may fairly be claimed that the conclusion argued for is
not merely probable but inevitable. Neither Biblically not morally is there any
alternative.
But how is this return of Israel to their God to
come about? Certainly not through the persuasive efforts of modern preachers of
the gospel. What Jesus himself failed to do and what defeated the best efforts
of Peter and Paul is hardly likely to be achieved through the eloquence, skill
and zeal of the best team the modern Christadelphian world can
muster.
The Bible indicates that two factors will combine
to achieve what three milleniums of history have not yet
wrought.
An earlier chapter in this series indicated Bible
evidence for believing that Jewish pride of achievement in their new state of
Israel — a very justifiable pride, humanly speaking —is soon to be
humbled by yet another desolation of the Land, this time at the hands of their
Arab enemies.
It needs but little exercise of the imagination
to realize what will be the effect of such an experience on those who have
laboured and schemed through their own self-reliant efforts to build a Jewish
homeland in Palestine. Here amid Arab squalor, laziness and ineptitude the Jews
have bent all their national energy and skill to the fashioning of a jewel of
modern statecraft. For the Arabs around them, whom they have three times
defeated with ease in recent wars, the Jews have nothing but
contempt.
What, then, will be the psychological effect when
these despised enemies ruthlessly and gloatingly destroy all that has been done
by the clever planning and consecrated endeavour of a generation of
irrepressible Jews? This is to be their national home, to which any Jew can come
for asylum from the world’s insane anti-Semitism. This State of Israel is
to be the focus and expression of all that is finest and best in Jewish life
throughout five continents.
To see all this crash in ruins and to experience
again the worst horrors of Belsen as Esau out-Hitlers Hitler in his mad fury
against Jacob — such an experience will utterly and finally extinguish the
hitherto incurable Jewish adherence to the doctrine of salvation by one’s
own works. A nation, which has never properly learned the meaning of faith in
God — (children in whom is no faith) —, will then be shut up to
faith in His power to deliver, as the only alternative available to them. Then
“they will cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he will deliver them
out of their distresses”.
At precisely such a time there will appear among
them a second John the Baptist to turn the hearts of the fathers into those of
children and the hearts of the children to be like their fathers Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob.
This was necessary before Messiah came the first
time. Then John made his great call to national repentance: “Prepare ye
the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God”
(Isaiah 40:3). It was needful then that “my messenger prepare the way
before me” (Malachi 3: 1).
So again in the Last Days, when Jewry is reduced
to utter hopelessness and black despair amidst the ruins of their highest
endeavour, “God will send Elijah the prophet before the coming of the
great and dreadful day of the Lord” (Malachi 4: 5).
It has often been argued, on the basis of Luke
1:17 that the Malachi prophecy has already had its fulfilment in John the
Baptist, but this view can be conceded as supplying only an incomplete
foreshadowing of a greater work. “If ye are willing to receive him, this
is Elias” said Jesus—and the Jews were not. In any case the
explicit: “Elias truly shall come first” (Matthew 17:11) ends
all argument. That use of a future tense after the death of John, together with
the context (“they have done unto John whatsoever they listed”)
should remove all doubts.
This Elijah that is yet to appear in Israel need
not be the original Elijah in person, risen from the dead. Since the Malachi
prophecy could have been fulfilled by John “in the spirit and power of
Elias”, the same prophecy may be fulfilled again through any other man
whom God may raise up in like character for a similar work.
It has already been suggested that “the
time of Jacob’s trouble” in the Last Days will be for a period of
1260 literal days—the unused 32 years of the Seventy Weeks prophecy. Since
the ministry of the first Elijah lasted for precisely that period of time (Luke
4:25, James 5:17, 18)[4]
before God sent rain upon the earth, it seems highly probable that this final
visitation of woe upon the people of Israel will also coincide with the ministry
of repentance proclaimed by the Elijah “which is for to come”. Thus
when the manifestation of their Messiah takes place at the end of that period
there will be in the Land “a people prepared for the Lord”, a people
chastened and humbled by the hammer blows of a benign Providence determined to
save them from themselves.
In a later chapter it is proposed to shew how
certain details in the Apocalypse reinforce the conclusions just reached. The
present investigation may be rounded off by a re-consideration of two familiar
parables of Jesus.
It has often been observed that the parable of
the importunate widow (Luke 18:1-8) comes at the end of a long discourse about
the second coming and that it also concludes with a further reference to the
second coming. Here is strong presumptive evidence that the parable was
intended to have special reference to the people of Israel in the Last Days.
When also it is recognized that the parable has remarkable similarities, both
verbally and in idea, to Jeremiah 15: 15, 18 this conclusion is reinforced. The
details now fall into place thus:
The widow appropriately represents Israel during
the centuries when the nation has been deprived of God—”thy Maker is
thine husband”. During these years of persecution and hardship God has
seemed to them as a harsh and unjust judge. Only when they turn to God with
importunity not to be gainsaid will He turn again the captivity of His people:
“And shall not God avenge his own elect (Israel), which cry day and night
unto him, though (hitherto) he be long-suffering with regard to them. I tell you
that (when they do so turn to him in importunity) he will avenge them speedily.
Nevertheless when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith (this faith which
refuses to be said nay) in the Land?”
Also, “Learn a parable of the fig tree.
When his branch is now become tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know
that summer is nigh”.
On countless occasions this parable has been
“rightly” applied to Israel in the Last Days. But is it possible
that the emphasis on the development of the State of Israel has been
misplaced? On a former occasion Jesus came to the fig tree seeking fruit meet
for repentance and found none, although such expectation at that time of the
year was fully justified (see Song of Songs 2: 11, 13). From that day to this,
that fig tree has been blasted and without fruit for God, but now in these Last
Days the putting forth of leaves must be and will be accompanied by the signs of
young, immature fruit which betoken an abundant harvest when the summer, which
is now nigh, brings its encouraging warmth and blessing.
[4] Where did Jesus and James
get this precise period of drought in Ahab's reign? It is not to be found
in, or even inferred from, 1 Kings 17, 18. Is each of these passages a direct
additional revelation or an interpretative link with Daniel?
