JERUSALEM, A KEY TO ENDTIME PROPHECY

JERUSALEM, A KEY TO THE END TIMES

                According to Jonathan Cahn in the short video I just shared on my FB site; the year 1917 was a jubilee year and it was also the year of the Balfour Declaration that separated a land for the Jews. Then exactly 50 years later in 1967 (The next Jubilee) the six day war took place and Israel reclaimed Jerusalem. Now on the 3^rd Jubilee in December of 2017 Donald Trump declared Jerusalem to be the official capital of Israel.

                To this day many Protestant denominations remain victims of the Catholic doctrine of replacement theology. It started with Constantine, who hated the Jews and so in order to integrate Christianity into his pagan kingdom; he began to distance Christianity from the Jews in every way possible. He knew that Jews do not assimilate, but always remain Jews and he wanted a united kingdom.

                Over the following centuries millions of Messianic Jews and others who refused to go along with the marriage of paganism with Christianity were hunted down and slaughtered, burned at the stake, tortured and annihilated by every means possible. The Jewish calendar was lost to the Julian calendar or pagan calendar and later was lost again to the Papal calendar, or the Gregorian calendar which is still in use today.

                In A.D. 70 Jerusalem and the temple were completely destroyed and over 1 ½ million Jews slaughtered and the rest were scattered into all of the nations of the world just as the Bible said they would be. Even among Christian centers the appointed times of the Lord were forgotten and the Sabbath day as well as Christians continued to distance themselves from the Jews. In fact the Popes got so far out of line that they claimed authority to change God’s Word at will and to even stand in His place upon the earth. Therefore the structure and continuity of the Bible was lost to them.

                Those Christians that continued to study Bible prophecy (And there were only a few) followed a pattern of leaving the Jews and Jerusalem completely out of their visions of last day events. To them the Jews and Jerusalem had been eliminated from all prophetic significance. God had forsaken them and had set His affection upon the church.

                The idea that the church would only become God’s chosen people by being grafted into the Jewish family tree was so very far from their minds and the idea that through Christ we become Abraham’s seed and heirs according to promise fell on deaf ears. For them there would be no future significance or prophetic meaning where the Jews were concerned. God’s promises to Israel had been conditional and since the Jews had not fulfilled the conditions, they had been blotted out of God’s future book forever.

                During the 1800s there had been several Bible Prophecy students that had concluded that Israel must come back into their land and their temple rebuilt in order for last day prophecies to be fulfilled, but even to them it seemed like an utter impossibility. Sir Isaac Newton was one of these and so by faith he predicted that Israel would return.

                When it did happen in 1948, a whole lot of prophecy students went back to the drawing board to see what they had missed and, of course, with their eyes opened, then began to see great prophecies heretofore ignored that spoke in glowing terms of God gathering Israel from all of the nations wherein He had scattered them and so little by little a prophetic picture began to form and a new understanding of last day events.

                Ezekiel 36:19-24 gives a summary of what God did when it says: “Also I scattered them among the nations and they were dispersed throughout the lands according to their ways and their deeds I judged them. When they came to the nations where they went, they profaned My Holy name, because it was said of them, “These are the people of the Lord; yet they have come out of His land.” But I was concerned for My holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations where they went. Therefore, say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord God, It is not for your sake, O house of Israel that I am about to act, but for My holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you went; And I will vindicate the holiness of My great name which has been profaned among the nations which you have profaned in their midst. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when I prove Myself holy among you in their sight. For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all lands and bring you into your own land.”

                In Romans 11:29 we see that God’s promises to Israel are irrevocable. In that same chapter we see that by faith we are grafted into the olive tree. We don’t replace them and furthermore in the same chapter we are told that a partial blindness or hardening has taken place in Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in and that God will then begin to deal with Israel as a nation again.

                This time of dealing with Israel we know as the Time of Jacob’s Trouble when God will deal specifically with the Jews until they look upon Him whom they have pierced (Zech. 12:10) and they will be reconciled to Yeshua even as the story of Joseph and his brothers tells us.

                There can be little doubt as to the timing of these events because as Zech. 14:2-5 tells us:  “For I will gather all the nations against Jerusalem to battle and the city will be captured the houses plundered, the women ravished and half of the city exiled, but the rest of the people will not be cut off from the city.  Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations as when He fights on the day of battle. (Armageddon) And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which is in front of Jerusalem on the east; and the Mount of Olives will be split in its middle from east to west by a very large valley, so that half of the mountain will move toward the north and the other half toward the south. And you will flee by the valley of My mountains, for the valley of the mountains will reach to Azel; yes, you will flee just as you fled before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. THEN THE LORD MY GOD WILL COME AND ALL THE HOLY ONES WITH HIM. Zech. 14:2-5

                Isn’t it interesting that right now, even as President Trump has declared Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel and talk of the third temple is in the air, that the very nations mentioned in Ezekiel are now gathering on Israel’s borders? It is signs like these that let us know that we are very near the end.

                Why is the tiny ancient city of Jerusalem the focus of the entire world? Why has it become a cup of trembling? For Zechariah says in chapter 12:2, 3 “Behold, I am going to make Jerusalem a cup that causes reeling to all peoples around; and when the siege is against Jerusalem, it will also be against Judah. And it will come about on that day that I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples; all who lift it will be severely injured. And all the nations of the earth will be gathered against it.”

                We need to understand the deeper prophetic issues here. God did not bring Israel back into their land because they have brought glory to His name in the nations wherein they have been scattered. He brought them back, because His own name is attached to the everlasting covenants He made with Israel and as long as Israel is not in His land, they bring reproach upon God and His name.

                But in His great mercy, when God brings them back He is going to purge and purify them and bring them face to face with the One whom they pierced and He will take away their hearts of stone and He will give them hearts of flesh. Why will He do that? Because in Jeremiah 31:31-34 God made another promise saying: “Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days declares the Lord, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God and they shall be My people.”

                So, in spite of the fact that Israel will initially believe in the antichrist as their Messiah, it says that when he commits the abomination of desolation in the temple, they will recognize their mistake and they will flee to the mountains by way of the valley. Mt. 24:15-24

                All of these events are shaping up so very rapidly and accurately in our day and we need to wake up and take a new look at Bible prophecy. The Catholic doctrine of replacement theology is absolutely false. From the very beginning the popes of Rome have sought to reign over Jerusalem in the place of Christ and they are still very much involved in the globalist regime to divide and conquer Jerusalem.

                It makes absolutely no sense from a political and global standpoint for anyone to care one wit about Jerusalem. It is one of the smallest and oldest cities in one of the smallest and oldest countries and it would be of no strategic sense at all to conquer it whatsoever… except for one thing. The book of Psalms called it the city of the Great King in Psalm 48:1. Jerusalem is destined by God to be the capital of the world during the millennial reign of Christ.

                The only way to make sense out of what is going on is to realize that the battle over Jerusalem is largely an invisible spiritual battle over ownership of the world between Christ and Satan. Satan is fighting against the eternal covenants that God has made to His chosen people Israel and by extension to all of those Gentiles who are grafted in. So there are many things to be accomplished in the years to come. All of Bible prophecy will reach its culmination and climax in the days ahead. It will be a time such there has never been on this earth since there was a nation… and in reality every prophecy in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation points towards this final wrapping up of all things.

                For us the choice is clear. We will stand with Yeshua, Jesus; the coming King of kings and Lord of lords. Whether we fully understand just how all of this will unfold, there can be no doubt that Yeshua; the King of the Jews is also Jesus, the King of the nations. Worship Him and serve Him with all of your heart. The Bible is not a patchwork of failed ideas and failed promises. It rather contains the flow of God’s purposes from Genesis to Revelation and in the end His Word and His name will have proved unfailing and true. And in the end we will all stand together on the sea of glass, Jew and Gentile together singing the song of Moses and the Lamb.