We can’t know the day nor the hour when Christ will return. But the season is fast approaching.
As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” Jesus answered…….“Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door. I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened. But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
Mat 24:3-36
Israel is God’s greatest political miracle.
The Jews of Jesus’ time infuriated the Roman Empire to unique persecution against them. Rome didn’t just burn their temple down in AD 70. To recover gold from melted instruments of worship, they took the charred remains apart stone by stone. Only one wall still stands. Today it is the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, one of the most sacred Jewish religious sites.
Rome not only destroyed the Jewish homeland. They also kicked the Jews out of their own country.
Survivors were hauled away as slaves, and scattered throughout the Roman empire, from Spain to Turkey. For any other people, such a catastrophe would have marked the end of their nationality. Absorption into the cultures they were tranplanted to should have followed, as with all other people so treated. Almost twenty centuries have passed since the Roman sacking of Jerusalem. Jews should have disappeared long ago.
Yet the Jewish people have done much more than simply survive. While retaining their separate religious and cultural identities, they have prospered, all over the world. Jews became part of the economic, intellectual and political elite of many countries.
Unfortunately, jealousy and distrust went hand in hand with Jewish success. International anti-semitism permeated western cultures. The Nazi Holocaust killed six million, wiping out two thirds of European Jews in World War Two. Yet out of the ashes of this worst-ever persecution, God kept his promise to raise up a new, modern day Israel.
This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again.
Ezekiel 11:17
Since the late nineteenth century, the international Zionist movement had been relocating Jews into Palestine. After the Holocaust, the Jewish trickle into the Holy Land surged.
Before she goes into labor, she gives birth; before the pains come upon her, she delivers a son. Who has ever heard of such things? Who has ever seen things like this? Can a country be born in a day or a nation be brought forth in a moment? Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than she gives birth to her children.
Isaiah 66:7-8
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion read the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The United States recognized the new Middle Eastern Jewish State on that same date.
Modern Israel was born in a single day. Just as Ezekiel and Isaiah predicted – over 2,300 years ago!
Israel reborn removes the biggest barrier to the fulfillment of biblical End Times predictions. For eighteen centuries, Old Testament and New Testament End Times prophesies had a giant hole in their middle. Many revolved around Israel as an existing nation in the Middle East – but there was no Hebrew state. Then in 1948 the Jewish Fig Tree, modern Israel, made all those impossible prophecies suddenly feasible.
End Times biblical prophecies are fascinating. So much of the the modern world is falling into patterns and specific details described in the Bible’s prophetic books, especially Daniel and Revelation. Jesus’ own words and these two Bible volumes contain many predictions, some quite specific, as to what will take place before and upon the return of humankind’s Messiah.
Jesus counseled that no one can know the day or the hour of His second coming. But He also said that we could know the season from the Sign of the Fig Tree – reborn Israel.
The summer of Jesus Christ’s return is near.
The former shriveled husk of Jewish nationhood is alive again. We are in the spring in which young Fig Tree Israel’s twigs are tender and its leaves are coming out. Summer follows spring.
