Chapter 5

These promises are to be found upon the pages of Holy Writ like the leaves of autumn--so many, so thickly strewn, now in single phrase, in connected passages, in whole chapters that should I attempt to read them slowly and distinctly, giving the sense, it would take me till the morning light.

The Lord declares He has written their names upon the palms of His hand.

They are as near and sensitively dear to Him, He says, as the apple of His eye. He is so interested, so determined concerning their restoration that He uses the most intensive language to express it, language that almost thunders aloud from the page as you read it.

He uses language no less intense than this:

"Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land (the land of Palestine) assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul."

Try and think of that! Let it penetrate your mind. The Lord who made heaven and earth, whose very name is omnipotence, says He will put the whole of His omnipotent heart and the whole of His omnipotent soul into the execution and the accomplishment of His determination and purpose to plant the children of Israel once more and forever in their own land.

In the face of that registered will and purpose what power is there of man or Devil; what force is there in all the sweep of the universe that can hinder the chosen and covenant people of God from going back to Palestine and possessing that land as theirs and theirs alone, forever?

But what evidence have we, what demonstration and proof that God will fulfill this postscript promise and plan?

What evidence have we from the bare statement of God that He will keep this promise?

The evidence is manifold and overwhelming.

Before even the children of Israel crossed the Jordan the Lord warned them in language which burns and blisters that if they did not keep the law covenant and walk in the ways of righteousness and truth He would cause them to fall before their enemies. They should go out one way before them and flee seven ways. Their cities should be taken and their wives ravished. They should be led captives into every land. They should become a proverb, a byword, a hissing and a scorn. Every hand should be against them to do them ill. They should find no ease whither they went, nor should the soles of their feet have rest. Amidst those nations the Lord should give them a trembling heart, failing eyes and sorrow of mind. Their life should hang in doubt. They should fear night and day, and have no assurance of life. In the morning they should say, Would God it were even, and at even they should say, Would God it were morning.

Their land should be made desolate and be an astonishment to the passer-by. In its desolation it should keep the sabbaths they should fail to give it. If they would not allow the land to rest in its sabbatic years, the Lord would cause it to have its ordained and natural rest by driving them out of it and allowing wind and rain and sun to take care of it and keep it fruitful.

Later on all this warning of woe and terror of judgments was emphasized by the prophets against the Jews.

They should become a nation of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

But while the Lord should use the nations to correct them He would not make a full end of His own people.

He would use the nations as the rods of His anger, as the instruments of discipline. He would use them by taking advantage of their own aggressive desires and ambitions, then after using them He would turn upon them, punish them for their pride and godless enmity to His people and make a full end of them.

Then as the hour should draw nigh for the restoration to the land He would cause the Jews as the national representatives of all Israel to bud, to blossom and fill the face of the whole world with fruit.

They should be the first to be restored to the land.

They would go back in unbelief.

And mark how the prophecies have been fulfilled!

The illustration of this fulfillment finds its most tragic emphasis in the history of the Jews since that day when their king, the Son of God and the Holy One of Israel was hung as a malefactor on a Roman cross.

They have not only been wanderers in every land, but they have suffered an agony no tongue can fittingly tell.

The men have been robbed. They have been broken on the wheel. They have been stretched on the rack. They have been flayed alive. They have been burned alive. They have been sent to sea by thousands as herded cattle; and they have been sent thither in rotting and sinking ships. Their wives and daughters have suffered worse than torture or death. Their children have been mutilated; and when they failed to bring a full and satisfactory price in the public market, men, women and children have been given away as worthless slaves, not worth even the price of a kennel dog.

They have been hunted like wild beasts of the mountain. Like frightened beasts they have trembled at the sound of approaching footsteps and the sound of a shaken leaf has caused them to flee.

If their Lord was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, truly may it be said of them that they have been through the centuries a nation of sorrows and acquainted with grief; but the sorrows were unlike those of their Lord. He carried the sorrows, the griefs and woes of others that He might relieve them; they carried their own sorrows put upon them by the wickedness and cruelty of others until tears were their meat and drink night and day.

Behold how the prophecies have been fulfilled in respect to their land.

For centuries it has kept a sabbath of rest.

It has rested from the toil of man; harvests have neither been sown nor reaped, nor the vintage gathered save here and there as with the sword in one hand and the sickle in the other.

The land is there as a land just as it was in the days when the man of Nazareth walked by the shores of blue Galilee or trod the hills of Judah. The mountains of Moab draw their lines of beauty against the measureless deeps of an orient sky. The valleys lie between like fruitful bosoms where wheat and barley may grow. The olive trees stand dusky in the deepening shade. Pomegranate and apricot stretch forth their weighted boughs and the grapes in Eschol clusters hang purple in the slant of westering suns. It is even yet a land of brooks and fountains of waters and men may still dig iron and brass from out of its rugged hills.

Yonder in Bashan within the range of your eyes you may count sixty cities of stone, walls and roofs and windows of stone, great swinging doors of stone. The centuries have beaten the wind, the rain, the storms and flying sand upon them. They remain. They have outworn the centuries. They are silent. No footfall is heard upon the threshold. The houses are empty save for a fox, a swiftly gliding viper, or a belated Bedaween who may stable his horse in a deserted room where once a happy family dwelt in the long ago.

The stone cities are waiting and every stone in door and window seems to be crying out:

"We are waiting till they return whose right alone it is to live and dwell here."

But what of the nations that scattered them and made them to suffer?

Where is Babylon the proud empire that took them captive; where is Babylon the golden city that saw them hang their harps upon the willows, sit down upon the banks of the strange river and give way to weeping as they yearned for their own land again?

Where is Greece whose phalanxes swept through their fields and spoiled their vineyards?

Where is Rome whose iron legions took their city, put thousand on thousands to the sword, destroyed the beautiful temple once hallowed by a Saviour's feet and then drew a ploughshare over Zion that it might become a ploughed field as foretold? The Rome that sculptured on its triumphal arches the figures of the captive Jews it had led in boastful mockery at the chariot wheels of returning conquerors?

These nations in their ancient glory have disappeared, the Lord as He promised has made a full end of them.

But what of Israel?

The Jews have answered for them.

There are fifteen millions of Jews to-day.

They are the most vital and vigorous race on the earth. They are five times the number of all Israel who left Egypt; and they are but a sixth part of them--two tribes, Judah and Benjamin.

They are the money makers and money loaners of the world. They are the merchants, the bankers, the musicians, the professors in school, in college and university. They are the philosophers, the scientists, the electricians and chemists. They have furnished prime ministers, statesmen, judges and generals. Such a statesman as Disraeli who glorified England, such a general as Massena whom Napoleon characterized as the "child of victory."

If to-day you should seek a representative in every department of human genius and endeavour you would find that representative to be either a Jew or a Jewess.

Fifteen millions of Jews!

What are these fifteen millions of Jews but fifteen millions of proofs that the book we call the Bible is true, is inerrant, infallible?

Fifteen millions of demonstrations and fifteen millions of indubitable proofs.

By so much as they prove that God keeps faith with His warnings of woe and judgment, by so much will He keep faith with the promise of good He has made; by so much is it sure He will yet plant them as He has said in their own land and will do so with His whole heart and His whole soul.

Already the sound of their footsteps may be heard on the homeward march.

Zionism is now an immense fact.

The spirit of nationalism has come back to Judah.

The blue and white flag of David has been unfurled.

Diplomats in the nations' counsels agree there can be no settled peace between Europe and the East till the Jew is back in his own land and Judah once more a recognized political state; that the Jews are the only people all the nations will agree should have Palestine, and the words, "Jewish State" are words repeated in common speech round the globe.

England has driven the Turk out of Jerusalem.

The corner-stone of a five million dollar university has been laid upon that Mount of Olives where once the Son of God amid its lonely shades prayed and agonized, a begun fulfillment of the prophecy of Zephaniah that in the latter days the Lord would execute judgment on the Gentile nations that should be gathered there and to His restored and delivered people turn again a pure speech, no longer the stuttering and smattering phrase of Yiddish, but the old Hebraic tongue of their fathers.

Already there are papers in Jerusalem published in Hebrew, schools are taught and many speak in the ancient language.

Many Jews are going back to Palestine.

Many more are there now than returned from Babylon.

They are going back as the Word of God foretold, in utter and absolute unbelief and bitter repudiation of the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was their foretold and foreordained Messiah.

They are going back with the vail upon their eyes and as blind as in the day when their fathers caused Him to be crucified by Roman hands.

They are going back to a time of anguish of which Jeremiah solemnly warns as "the day of Jacob's trouble," and our Lord describes as the tribulation, "the great one," the like of which the world has never seen and will never see again.

They are going back to be set up by a league of ten nations and to enter into an alliance and covenant with its godless head as their political and false Messiah.

They will suffer until there shall come upon that generation all the righteous blood shed upon the earth from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zacharias, the son of Bacharias who was slain between the temple and the altar, and the blood of the Son of God which they invoked in judgment on themselves and their children in that fatal hour when Pilate convinced of the innocence of Jesus and wishing to let Him go had washed His hands in water, putting the responsibility of the crucifixion upon them as a people. Then it was they cried that terrible cry:

"His blood be on us, and on our children."

But then as now, and always since the days of Elijah, there was and is an elect remnant in Israel.

For their sakes the Lord will come.

He will descend with His host to Mount Sinai, the place of the law; the spot where Israel rejected grace and sought that covenant which neither they nor their children have ever been able to keep.

He will sweep with His mighty army to Jerusalem.

He will overthrow the Gentile nations gathered there under the Devil-incarnate Antichrist.

He will stand upon the Mount of Olives.

The elect remnant will behold Him come.

They will look upon Him whom their fathers pierced.

They will fall down in anguish before Him.

They will mourn for Him as one mourneth for his only son.

They will take up the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah and make it their confession of faith and bitter, self-accusing lamentation.

They will say:

"We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."

And in that hour, in that day of days shall there be a fountain opened to the house of David, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and uncleanness.

The Lord will cause Jerusalem to be rebuilded "upon her own heap." He will ordain the erection of that temple in which He shall establish the throne of His holiness.

Like David He will reign first over Judah. After that He will send Gentile messengers like "fishers" to seek out and find the descendants of the ten lost tribes. They will respond to the proclamation that will be made and to the search that will be instituted in that eastern land and among those peoples whither they were first carried away. There will be many impostors among them; but the Lord will make them to "pass under the rod" as when the true sheep are struck with the owner's mark and as they take up their journey Zionward all who are not of Israel will be purged from their midst.

Those who are really of the covenant people will be quickened, regenerated, and when they enter the land will be welcomed by Judah and Benjamin.

They shall become one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel. One king shall be king to them all. They shall not be two nations any more, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms at all. The Lord will make a covenant of peace with them and multiply them and set His sanctuary in the midst of them forever. His tabernacle shall be with them. He will be their very God as He shall be the God of the whole earth. They shall be His peculiar people. All the Gentiles shall know that He has set them apart for Himself when they behold His temple erected in their midst, the most wonderful building in all the earth.

And thus will be fulfilled the prophecy concerning Israel quoted and emphasized by the Holy Spirit through the Apostle Paul that the Deliverer should come to Zion and turn away ungodliness from Jacob and that all Israel--that is--Israel united and as twelve tribes, should be saved.

It is at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, then and not till then that the solemn and covenant promises of God made to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob will be fulfilled and united, redeemed, regenerated and saved Israel set in their own land as the center and channel of blessing to the earth.

And because there can be no permanent peace in the world till Israel has been restored; and because I wish to see, not only peace among the nations and Israel reaping the blessings of the unconditional covenant of God's grace and unchanged faithfulness, but because I yearn to see the hour when the Lord shall enter upon His own inheritance and justify Himself before heaven and earth as Judah's Lord, as Israel's God and turn the accusation of His cross: "This is Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews" into the pean of His coronation as such, I preach the Second Coming.

VI

Only at the Second Coming of the Christ of God Will a Government of Everlasting Righteousness and Peace be Established Upon the Earth

IT was the original purpose of God to make the people of Israel the head of nations, place them in Palestine as the geographical center of the earth, make them its political center, send His own Son to be their incarnate king, use them as a channel of earthly and spiritual blessing and make this world the most perfect and happiest spot in all the wide universe.

They failed to meet their opportunity.

Then the Lord transferred the possibility of world rulership from the Jews to the Gentiles.

He did this by handing political power and authority to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.

This rulership and sway of the world descended in its ordained and foretold succession down through Medo-Persia with its incorporation of Babylon, through the temporary but immensely extended empire of Greece which under Alexander included both Babylon and Medo-Persia, and after that the colossal and magic empire of Rome, swallowing up as it did the three empires or kingdoms which preceded it.

Since the division of Rome into Western and Eastern empires the rulership of the world has been maintained by the various nations composed of those people dwelling in the territory once occupied by Rome.

The world has been ruled by Turks, Spaniards, Germans, by the French and by the English.

The Gentile nations in this special and prophetic territory have been the world rulers.

It has been peculiarly Gentile rulership and in Scripture is called, "The times of the Gentiles."

Gentile times, Gentile rulership has lasted for twenty-five hundred years.

It has been an amazing rule.

It has been a rulership that has revealed the genius, the brilliance and the God-given powers of man.

It has been a rulership that has revealed the iniquity, the sin, the mad ambition and devil-inspired policies of man.

In all the twenty-five hundred years of this Gentile rule there have not been one hundred consecutive years of universal peace.

It has been twenty-five hundred years of war, of rapine, murder and measureless lust.

Cities have been destroyed, fields have been laid waste, women have endured the last outrage. Children have been orphaned, right has been upon the scaffold and wrong upon the throne, prison chains have been for virtue, silk and velvet for vice, civilization after civilization has been destroyed, the earth has been filled with anguish beyond the power of tongue or pen to describe, and blood enough has been shed through man's inhumanity to man to float all the navies of the world, and money and treasure enough wasted to have provided a palace for every man and woman on earth.

A little less than five years ago men everywhere were talking of peace and safety.

Christianity and civilization were walking hand in hand.

Christianity or that which professed to be Christianity had accepted all the claimed benefits of civilization.

Rapid transit, the telephone, all the triumphs of applied science were announced as the by-products of the Gospel. Even though the churches were becoming more or less empty and the people were turning away to other centers of instruction or enlightenment or consolation or hope, preachers were everywhere and with great insistence announcing that the world was growing better every day and that we were rapidly approaching the purple and the gold of millennial times. The hour was not far distant when the lion and the lamb should lie down together. There was much talk about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. People were coming together and having a better and more disinterested estimate of each other. Religion was ceasing to be dogmatic and precise and becoming more and more a profession that was free from restraint.

Christian ministers in the pulpit and supposedly wise men in the counsels of the nations with optimistic utterance announced that the days of barbarism had passed away, the brutality of war was at an end. Men and nations would no longer adjourn their differences to the field of battle. A magnificent palace of peace had been erected in that country that had for centuries been the bloody ground where Europe settled its political issues. In this splendid home of arbitration the nations were to meet as friends and brothers and calmly arrange and solve all matters that had hitherto kept them menacingly apart.

War had become so abhorrent to what was called the Christian sense of the nations that mothers were exhorted to banish from the nurseries anything that might suggest the thought of war, such as trumpets, drums or toy guns. So completely had the peace idea pervaded the mind of the people, the idea that peace had come to stay and nothing must be tolerated that would even hint at war, that a soldier or a sailor wearing the uniform of his country was no longer acceptable in a public place, were it a restaurant, a music hall or even a church.

Men who were opposed to spending a dollar to make a nation ready for the possibility of war were hailed as the advanced thinkers and the men worthy of the suffrage of the people; while those who contended human nature had not been changed, that a nation was simply the individual grown large and the jealousies, the covetousness and ambitions of governments would always make it possible for the strong to prey upon the weak and for the unprincipled under the guise of national necessity to attack their unprepared neighbours and therefore just as much as a city rests in confidence with the presence within it of a well-equipped police force, equally so the comfort and security of peace could be best maintained by a nation governed by right principles whose army and navy were ready to resist successfully any unjust assault upon its honour or integrity, were treated with pity, if not scorn, as still under the spell of benighted and barbaric days.

"Peace and safety!" these were the pleasant words that lulled a pleasure-seeking and money-making generation into self-satisfied rest and the mirage of millennial days already arrived.

Then, suddenly, like a bolt out of a clear sky, or the overflow in raging lava tide of an unsuspected volcano, the most stupendous, ghastly and brutally devilish war the world has ever known was on in all its fiendish fury, sweeping from England to the Euphrates and from the Rhine and Danube on the north to the glittering sands of Africa on the south, rolling its waves of blood and sending its sickening and indescribable horrors through those lands and among those people at one time constituting the four kingdoms to whom God had committed the rulership of the world; that region occupied by Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome and whose administration of world affairs is called "the times of the Gentiles."

To-night ten millions of the world's flower of manhood lie rotting in their graves. Six millions of women and children have been starved to death. Women have been unspeakably ruined, children mutilated and flung as helpless debris upon the charity of strangers, suffering their orphaned estate and not knowing why.