Connecting 3,000 Years of Israel's History

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We’re going to be talking about the regathering of Israel and Israel’s restoration, and we’re going to connect 3000 years of history in the next 30 minutes. So we’re going to go through a hundred years of history per minute. That’s pretty fast. So your seats don’t come with seat belts, but if they did, you should strap them on, okay, because we’re going to do this and it’s going to be really exciting. So I have a board here behind me. I’m going to get to this in a minute, and we’re actually, you’re going to get to judge me based upon my artistic skills tonight, not just my speaking skills. So if you’ve come to see a third grader, scratch out some things, you’re in the right place. Hey, as we get into the new year, one of my favorite parts about every new year is it’s a reset and it’s an opportunity for all of us to look to the future with expectation.
I think everybody starts the new year thinking, wow, what’s going to happen this year? Especially forward to every year? What’s God going to do in my life this year? And I think it’s important for us to have a context for what God has been doing in our lives before we can put our hope and expectation upon what he’ll do. And so this teaching tonight is all about context. And if you don’t understand context and you don’t understand perspective, then you don’t really know where you are and you really don’t know where you’re going. You have to know where you’ve been in order to know where you’re going. There’s an old saying that says that, right? I mean, if I told you the score of the Cowboys game tomorrow night and I said the score of the game is 21 to 20, and that’s all I said, and you had no idea what time it was, you’d think, okay, either that’s really good.
It’s the first quarter, no big deal. I don’t know anything to be nervous about. Or maybe it’s two minutes to go in the fourth quarter. That changes everything, doesn’t it? Context matters. And so as we look at the history of Israel tonight, my goal is to provide for you a context for the times that we’re living in right now because there’s so much happening around the world that it can be easy to lose it. So we all know that the Bible is a book that talks about God’s redemptive plan for humanity. It starts out with the fall of mankind. And really the rest of the book is just a big long read on how God is trying to win us back to himself and the different ways that he does that. And so what it shows us is that in redemptive history and in the redemptive work of God, he’s always trying to reach the universal, which is all of mankind, always trying to reach the universal.
God wishes that every single person would come to know him and would be in his kingdom. And if you’re here tonight and you don’t know him, you don’t have a relationship with him. This is what good news is. That’s why we call it good news, because there is a good thing that God is wanting to do. He’s wanting to redeem you. Whatever messes you’ve made, whatever things you’ve fallen into, whatever sin has tangled you up, he’s always looking to reach the universal, but he does it in scripture through the particular, this is how God works. He reaches the universal through the particular and the particular that God chose to use to reach all the nations with the good news of who he is, is a group of people called Israel, the Jewish people. We see this in Genesis 12 when God calls Abraham, it says, the Lord had said to Abraham, go from your country, your people in your father’s household to the land.
I will show you, I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you. I will make your name great and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and whoever curses you, I will curse and all peoples of the earth will be blessed through you. This is God’s intention. He calls Abraham not to just give him a little kingdom on his own, but he says, all nations, all people, all families of the earth will be blessed through you. He chooses a particular person to create a particular group of people to reach the universal. We see this again in Exodus nine. When God says to Pharaoh through Moses, he says, I am going to do this to demonstrate my power so that the world may see that I am powerful and know that I am God. In one Samuel 17, we all know the story of David and Goliath.
David goes down to the creek, gets a stone, five smooth stones, right? And he goes up to Goliath and what does he say? He doesn’t tell Goliath you’re going down today because I can’t stand you. You’re going down today because you’re just a horrible person. He says, I am going to take you down today so the world would know that there is a God in Israel. That’s what he says. This is David’s motivation. It’s to see the universal come into an understanding that there is a God in Israel and that his kingdom reigns over all other kingdoms, even over the kingdoms of the Philistines. You see this again in Isaiah 49 where the Lord says to the Jewish people, I will make you a light to the Gentiles so my salvation will reach to the ends of the earth. God reaches the universal through the particular, okay, so some of us in this room are Jewish, many of us are not.
I am not Jewish. What does this mean for us? What does this mean for us as the church, the worldwide body of the Messiah? I like what Dr. Dan Jester says as he describes what the church is. He says, the church is those called from all nations joined to the nation of Israel for the sake of world redemption. You see that join to the nation of Israel. The church is not a group of people from the nations replacing the people of Israel, superseding the people of Israel, none of those things. We’re joined to the people of Israel and we’re joined to Israel’s destiny through Israel’s King Yeshua. You see, Israel’s history is your history. If you’re a believer in Yeshua, if you follow the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Israel’s history is your history. Israel’s destiny is your destiny. And that should give you great confidence as you’re about to see as we go through the rest of this teaching.
So this is why history and knowing the history of the Jewish people matters because it’s a testimony of God reaching the world through the Jewish people. And now we have been grafted in through Yeshua to be a part of that. Now, what we see when God promises this covenant to Abraham in Genesis 12, you see seven distinct things that he promises Him five right away in Genesis five or 12, and then two later in the rest of the Book of Genesis. And they all are statements that start with I will. This is God saying I will. He says, I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I will make you a blessing to the whole world. I will bless those who bless you. I will curse those who curse you. I will give you the land of Israel and I will establish this covenant for a hundred years, for a thousand years, no forever.
Everything God says in the promise to Abraham is unconditional. It is. I will. I am God and I will do this regardless of what you do. This is what I’m doing. This is my end of the bargain. I’m giving you these seven things very clearly and one of them that is incredibly important that sometimes we overlook because it’s a touchy subject, is land the land of Israel. Anybody ever heard of it? It’s a little bit hotly contested, right? The land of Israel. Genesis 1518, on that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said to your descendants, I give this land from the wadi of Egypt to the Great River, the Euphrates. Did you know that land in the Hebrew scriptures is mentioned over a thousand times? It’s the fourth most mentioned noun in the Hebrew scriptures, and it’s mentioned more than covenant. Covenant is mentioned somewhere between two and 300 times depending upon the Hebrew.
And of those two or 300 times, it is directly or indirectly connected to the land of Israel 70% of the time. So you could easily make the assumption or make the conclusion there is that the land and the covenant are uniquely connected. So we as believers and followers of Yeshua have to see that the land is an important part of the promise to reach all people. So the land is a promise, right? It’s unconditional. We’ve established that and throughout history, the Jewish people have had the land and we know that through times they’ve sinned and fallen and then they’ve been kicked out of the land, right? The distinction that we have to make and that you need to understand is that there’s a difference between the promise of the land and the possession of the land. Everything in the Abrahamic covenant is unconditional. I will promise this promise of the land.
Now, the mosaic covenant comes along and things change a little bit. God starts to put some requirements on the Jewish people. And what does he say? Instead of saying, I will, he says, you must must this, you must that you must this. And we all know they all add up and they roll out into about 613 laws in the Mosaic covenant. So the possession of the land becomes conditional. Do you see the difference here? The promise of the land is completely unconditional, but the possession of it being in it, taking ownership of it, being active in it, that is conditional to Israel’s obedience to God. And you see this in Deuteronomy four, one conditional possession of the land of Israel. Now Israel, listen to the statutes and ordinances that I’m teaching you to do so that you may live and go in and possess the land that Adonai the God of your fathers is giving you.
So we know that Israel doesn’t really do a good job of this. This is what we read in the Bible, right? And they run into some issues and eventually the prophets start to prophesy of them, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and others. Hey, you’re going to get the boot because you’re not owning up to your end of the bargain here. The you must things, you’re not doing those. And so we see in Jeremiah nine verses 13 through 16, the Lord said, it is because they forsaken my law, which I set before them. They have not obeyed me or followed my law. Instead, they followed the stubbornness of their hearts. They have followed the Baals as their ancestors taught them. Therefore, this is what the Lord Almighty the God of Israel says. See, I will make this people eat bitter food and drink poisoned water. I will scatter them among nations that neither they nor their ancestors have known, and I will pursue them with this sword until I’ve made an end of them.
The New living translation says, I will scatter them among nations that their ancestors have never heard of. Now, I don’t know about you, and you’re going to see this as we fast forward, but I bet you at that time, around five, 600 bc the Jewish people haven’t heard of Argentina, Zimbabwe, Japan, China, India, all these countries. God fulfills his word, Hey, you mess up with me. I’m going to scatter you out. You’re not going to have possession of this land anymore. So it reminds me of a story I heard just the other day. George W. Bush was in an airport and he’s walking to his gate and he sees this man, and he looks to be dressed just like Moses. He’s got a big white beard. He’s wearing a long white coat. He’s holding two sewn tablets. He’s got a big step. And so George Bush goes up to him, George W, and he says, pardon me sir, but are you Moses?
Very pensive George W. Bush. And the man wouldn’t talk to him. And so he taps him unless he said, excuse me, I just got to know, are you Moses? And again, he wouldn’t talk to him. Well, this is the president of the United States. So he starts to get a little bit upset, and at this point, his secret service agent comes over and says, Hey, gw, is everything okay? He said, well, yeah, this guy won’t talk to me. I think he’s Moses and he won’t tell me if he is. So the Secret Service agent goes over to Moses and he says, Hey, look, what’s the deal? Why won’t you talk to us? Are you Moses or are you not? Could you just give us an answer? And Moses slowly comes around and he turns to him and he said, look, the last time I talked to a bush, I was wandering the desert for 40 years.
Got to be careful. So the scattering of the Jewish people, this, for those of you who don’t read third grade writing, is a map of Europe, okay? I have noted for you Israel with this nice star of David. Alright? To give you some context, what we’re going to do in the next few minutes is we’re going to look at the scattering of the Jewish people. We’re going to look at their life in exile, and then we’re going to look at the regathering of the Jewish people. And all of this is going to come to a point where you tonight can get a better understanding of what God’s doing in your lifetime and how you can be a part of it as it pertains to Israel. So we need to look at the different scatterings of the Jewish people. In 7 22 BC was the Assyrian Assyrian exile.
So the Assyrian exile took away the 10 Northern tribes of Israel. For those of you who remember, after Solomon left, the 10 Northern tribes split from the two Southern tribes, and they were taken into captivity by Assyria. And so they were brought up into the land of Assyria, into the northern parts, all 10 tribes. These 10 tribes became what is known the lost tribes of Israel. So if you’ve heard the Lost Tribes of Israel, they come from the 10 Northern Tribes and many Jewish scholars believe that there’s no record of them anymore. Interestingly enough, the modern Ethiopian Jewish community, which is still alive and well, there’s 130,000 Ethiopian Jews with black skin living in Israel. They trace their ancestry to the tribe of Dan, which was a part of the Northern 10 tribes. Alright? And we’ll talk more about them in a minute. So then after the Assyrians come onto the picture, they kind of lose power after a while.
And then the Babylonians come in and you’re going to get to view my bad spelling. The Babylonians come in and in 5 97 to 5 86 BC they take over the Assyrians and they come into Jerusalem and they take the southern tribes of Israel into captivity, right? King Nebuchadnezzar comes in, they destroy the temple in 5 86 BC and the Jews go into captivity in Babylon and the land of Israel, the temple is destroyed and they’re there until 5 38 BC when Persia comes on the scene. So the Persians take over the Babylonians, A BP, okay? Very easy to remember. The Assyrians get taken over by the Babylonians, get taken over by the Persians, and in 5 38 bc then they’re allowed to come back and they start rebuilding the walls with Nehemiah and they construct the second temple. Alright? So they live here until the Persians are taken over by the Greeks in the third century, right before the Romans.
And that’s where Hanukkah takes place during the Greek rule. Okay? Then the Romans take over the Greeks. I mean the Middle East is just, does this sound familiar to any of us living right now? There’s a little bit of war going on for this little piece of land. I wonder why, huh? And so they take over, the Jews come back and they live here until the Romans 80 70 comes. We all know that Yeshua predicted the fall of Jerusalem. He predicted the temple being destroyed in 80, 70, right? And so that’s exactly what happens. The Romans take over, they crush, they burn the temple in 80 70, they flatten Jerusalem. But what most of us don’t know is that there was still a Jewish remnant left in the land of Israel and around one 30 ad. Now common era, emperor Hadrian, the Roman Empire, he really starts to get tired of these Jews.
And so he decides to rename Jerusalem, Lina just to get rid of its name, to take away its significance to the Jewish people. And he renames the land of Israel, Syria, Palestinia, does this sound familiar to anyone? As is slight to the Jewish people. He completely renames it. He erases Israel from the map. And the Jewish people that are left in Israel, there was still a few hundred thousand of them. They get really mad. They stage a rebellion called the Bar Coba Revolt. And the Romans put them down, about 500,000 Jewish people die. And then there is no more Jewish presence in the land of Israel. So during these different scatterings, Jewish people are going to different places. They’re getting out of Dodge, right? And Yeshua prophesized this in Matthew 24. He talks about them coming and people leaving and all these different things. So this is all fitting into prophecy.
So what do they do during these different Scatterings? I mentioned the Assyrian. Some of them went down into Ethiopia. There’s a whole legend that I can’t get into right now, but the Queen of Sheba in Ethiopia and Solomon, they have a son named Ek. And so the Ethiopian kingdom becomes very friendly to Jews. And so they have a large population of Jewish people go down into Ethiopia. They’ve pretty much become forgotten for about 1700 years actually. But many come through here and they go through Northern Africa. And many have at this point already started to come up into Turkey. We know Paul visits a lot of Jewish communities in Turkey. Many of them come over here to Italy because this is the Roman Empire in the Roman Empire, pretty much has almost all of this region at this point. So all of this is open territory for the Jews to begin to move to.
And so what ends up happening is you just have migration over all these years. You fast forward to basically the 12 hundreds. Now England kicks the Jews out in 1290. Alright? So in all this times the Jewish people are living in minority in mostly Christian lands after the spread of the church. And then in 1492, so you have 1290, there’s the 12 there somewhere, 1290 England kicks out the Jews, 1390 France kicks out the Jews. 1492, the Inquisition, Spain kicks out the Jews. At the time of about the 12th century, 90% of the world’s Jews were living in the Iberian Peninsula. This is where the Sephardic Jewish community emanates from. SRA is the word for Spain. So then you have the Sephardic community after 1492, many of them leave, some of them go to South America, some of them go back into the Muslim lands in Northern Africa, become the Meraki Jewish community, living amongst the Muslims there.
And then many even come back and settle into the Ottoman Empire, which was now in Palestine at the time. But yet many move up into this region of Europe as they’re getting kicked out. So then in the 15 hundreds you have Germany. Now Germany was home for a lot of Jewish people who moved up even from the Roman Empire when they got kicked out of Rome. This area was called Ashkenaz. And ashkenaz is the word basically for Germanic lands. So you have the development of the two main houses of Judaism, the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic. So for those of you who have ever heard those words, this is where that comes from. And so all the while all this antisemitism continues to push the Jewish people and they get pushed further and further east until eventually they end up in this little swath right over here that encompasses Poland, Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and the very eastern western part of Russia.
This is what becomes to be known as the pale, pale of settlement. And the pale of settlement was established basically by Catherine the great because she gave Jews in the late 17 hundreds, the choice convert to Russian orthodoxy Christianity or get out of here. And so they essentially established this area of the Russian Empire and say, okay, all of the Jewish people can live here. Alright? It’s about 400,000 square miles, around 1900 to the 1880s. 5 million Jewish people lived here. It was about almost 70% of the world’s Jewish population lived in this region. And most of them it was just completely rural lands just out in the boonies. Alright? Any of you have ever seen Fiddler on the roof? That’s where this takes place. Tevya lives in Anka. Anka is in the PA of settlement in Ukraine in what’s called ale. Ale is just a little word for his tiny little village and outpost.
And so the Jewish people end up being here, and this is where history really starts to get cooking. Okay? We’re only talking about a hundred and what, 19 years ago now. So all of this history, which we just flew through now leads up into this little tiny pinch point, this strip of land from Poland and Lithuania on the north all the way down to Ukraine, where now all of a sudden 5 million Jewish people are living and awaiting their return from exile. So there’s a problem that starts to develop, okay? Around the 18 hundreds, if you’re a Jewish person, 99% sure you’re religious, okay? Living in America today, we meet lots of Jewish people and the majority of Jewish people in America are secular. I think around 56 percentage percent of them are, they don’t practice religion. They’re Jewish by a heritage, okay? Not so in the 18 hundreds, if you are Jewish, you are an Orthodox Jew, you were praying five times a day, you were going to Yeshiva, you were going to school, you were learning Hebrew, et cetera, because you were living in a Christian land, you had no rights to be any kind of a member of society.
You couldn’t send your kids to public school, they couldn’t go to university. You were living your little Jewish life because your Shabbat is on Saturday, the Christian Shabbat is on Sunday. So there was just sort of a separation of culture. Well, that all changes and it changes in a big way in 17 89, 17 89, the French get a little bit testy as they are known to do, and they decide to have a revolution, right? The French Revolution. And this becomes the period of enlightenment. And the reason that that’s important to us to know is because this is the first time in European history where people are given basic human rights based upon them just being individuals. So now it really presents something interesting to the Jewish community. You see, before 1789, the Jewish people were stuck between what they call the two Gs, God and the Go or the Gentiles.
And what that means is they’re stuck in exile because God kicked them out of the land of Israel. They don’t have possession anymore, they were disobedient, and they’re sitting there waiting for the Messiah to return. And there’s nothing we can do but pray. All we can do is pray. So we get our holy books and we pray and we pray and we pray for the Messiah to come. But in the meantime, these Gentiles are ruling over us. We’re living in Christian lands and we’re waiting for God to take us out of exile and return us back to the land of Israel. So at the beginning of 18 hundreds, there’s 2.5 million Jews on the earth, 90% of them are living in Europe. So 1789 rolls around. And now all of a sudden, all these young Jewish people are growing up with a choice. Wait a minute, I can go to public school now.
I can hold an official office position as a politician, as a lawyer, as a doctor. And you see waves of Jewish people now sending their kids to public school, making the hard choice between, well, do we observe halaka, which is the Jewish law, or do we let our kids become members of society? And so you see a giant shift start to take place in what it means to be a Jewish person. Now, you’re no longer just an Orthodox religious Jew. You could be a German Jew, you could be a Polish Jew, you could be a Hungarian Jew. Well, what does that lead to? All of this in 1789 leads to the rise of something ugly called nationalism in Europe because here’s what ends up happening. For really a thousand or so years, you as a Jewish person, were relegated to the outside of society on the basis of your religion, right?
You’re a Jew. You didn’t accept Jesus as your Messiah, therefore God is punishing you. He’s making you live on the outskirts of society. You don’t have anything to do with you. So we persecute you because you’re Jewish, because you believe in a different religion than us. Now the Jewish person is on the same foothold in society as the German guy whose great grandfather was in the war and rode with all these honors and everything. Now, do you see how this can become a little bit problematic for people? Now you’re trying to tell me that my son who’s in school is learning history and he’s the same status as me, and I have this deep heritage as a French person, as a Hungarian, as a pole. No. So you see nationalism start to rise up and you see an outbreak of antisemitism from 1880 to 1884 in the PAE of settlement, particularly there were 266 pogroms against Jewish people in four years.
And you see a shift start to take place where now we’re no longer persecuting you because you’re practicing Jewish religion. We’re persecuting you because you are Jewish by race, by ethnicity, by heritage. And in 1879, that’s a nine a German by the name of Wilhelm Mar coins, a term called antisemitism. And he starts to make arguments that Jews should not be accepted on the basis of them being Jewish. It doesn’t matter if they’re secular or not. Well, now you have all of these Jewish people that went to university thinking to themselves, the enlightenment is the key. If I can only go to the seminary, if I can only go to the university, then everyone will accept me as a Jew, even if I don’t practice my religion. That was completely erased. And all of this in the 1880s starts to get to a funnel point where there’s more and more antisemitism, there’s more and more persecution.
And what ends up happening is a hero rises up on the scene. His name is Theodore Herzel. Many of you may have heard of him, maybe you may haven’t, but many Jewish people refer to him as the modern Moses of the Jewish people. He was born in 1860 in Budapest. He went to the university in Vienna. He was an emancipated Jew in enlightened Jew in something called the, which is the Jewish Enlightenment. And he thought to himself, this is great people once they become learned will accept Jewish people. He starts reading books from notable authors. And guess what? They’re perpetrating Jew hatred, the problem of the Jew. He goes to the not the K at the Parliament in Hungary and he hears somebody from a member of parliament say, go to Palestine Jew. And he’s thinking to himself what is going on? So he gets this idea and he writes a book about it in 1896 called the Jewish State.
He says, you know what? If the Jewish people who are such great people, such great contributors to society, if they could just have a state of their own, we would be welcome to the family of nations. And the nations of the earth would see that the Jewish people are a net positive to humanity and they would accept us. So he starts something called political Zionism. Zionism is the return of the Jewish people to their land to have their own choice and what they want to do. And at the time it was to the return of Palestine, okay? This is where they were eyeing this. So you see this resurgence in the 1880s because of antisemitism that Jewish people are saying, well, what are we going to do? They’re not accepting us for being educated and all these other things. And so people start writing in Hebrew, you start to see a lot of people longing for Zion.
Psalm 1 37 says, by the rivers of Babylon, we wept, longing for Zion. It says, if I ever forget you, Jerusalem, let me cut off my right arm. Let it forget its skill. This was starting to swell up in the hearts of Jewish people because of antisemitism, because they had nowhere else to go. So in 1897, Herzl starts something called the World Zionist Congress. Alright? They have the first world Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. And he says something in his diary after he goes back and he says, were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly, it would be this at Basel, I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, I would be greeted by universal laughter in five years perhaps, and certainly in 50 years everyone will perceive it. That was in 1897.
The United Nations voted on November 29th, 1947, 50 years later, to adopt a resolution that would allow the Jews to have a state in mandatory Palestine, which at the time was the land of Israel. Herzl was a very prophetic person, and this is why Jews refer to him as the modern Moses. So all of these things are starting to happen, and as we look at this as believers, we see things like Ezekiel 36, 22 through 24 start to come alive. Therefore say to the Israelites, this is what the sovereign Lord says. It is not for your sake, people of Israel that I’m going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone, I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them.
Then the nations will know that I’m the Lord. Remember, the Lord is interested in the nations declares the sovereign Lord, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes, for I will take you out of the nations, I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. So 1897, in between 1880 and 1914, the start of World War I, almost 3 million Jews leave Russia and immigrate out because of antisemitism. Most of them come and found the modern American Jewish community, but a trickle of them go to Palestine, which is the land of Israel. So through what become known as five waves of Allah, if you aren’t familiar with that term, Allah is the Hebrew word for ascend to go up and Allah is to make return. So there were five distinct waves of Allah of immigration to the Jewish homeland in Israel.
Between 1880 and nineteen thirty nine, four hundred and seventy 5,000 Jewish people immigrated to the area of Israel, the Palestine, and on the eve of World War ii, when Hitler was marching into Poland with his tanks and his blitz, Greg, 40% of the population of mandatory Palestine of the land of Israel was Jewish. Now, most people think that the state of Israel was created out of some sympathetic gesture by the nations because of the Holocaust that is factually untrue. The nation of Israel was created because God is a God who keeps his promises because God establishes a remnant and he keeps a remnant and he will do anything to make sure that it happens, even if it’s using secular people like Theodore rehearsal. This is the times that we’re living in friends. Since 1948, almost 3 million Jews, 3.5 million Jews have made Allah to Israel from over 40 different countries. Now here’s an exciting one.
I mentioned the Ethiopian Jews, and I’m winding this down here. Jeremiah 31 8 says this. See, I will bring them from the land of the north and gather them from the ends of the earth. Among them will be the blind and the lame expectant mothers and women in labor. A great throng will return to show you how specific God is about fulfilling prophecy. Fulfilling prophecy, okay? Operation Solomon was an Israeli operation in 1991 to airlift Ethiopian Jews out of Ethiopia and bring them to the land of Israel. Over a period of 36 hours, 15,000 Jews on 34 aircraft were evacuated under secret by the Israeli IDF to come to the land of Israel. When one plane took off in Ethiopia, it took off with 1087 people. When it landed in the state of Israel, it landed with 1089 people. There was a woman, two women who gave birth on board completely fulfilling. Jeremiah 31, 8 women in labor will return. That happened in our lifetime in 1991. Isn’t that amazing?
So now today we have the modern Messianic community in Israel, which was basically zero in 1948. Today it’s two 20,000, 25,000 people strong. And we seek God fulfilling his word to us in our lifetime. And what I want you to understand is that these are things that our grandparents, our great grandparents, dreamed of seeing the fulfillment of Israel coming back to take possession of the land. It’s a sign to us that God is yet again preparing to reach the universal through the Jewish people. And we as a church are connected to that through the Jewish Messiah because of Israel’s destiny. David Begarian, Israel’s first prime minister who immigrated in the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, said this in Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles. In order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles. Friends we’re living in miraculous times.
And me as a younger person under the age of 40, I want to do whatever I can to get involved in this because this is a move of God And what’s happened over the last 120 years, the speed at which it’s taken place and the miraculous nature of it, it’s simply nothing but miraculous. You can’t prove it any other way, but say it’s supernatural. And I want to end with a story tonight about a man named Eddie Jacobson. Eddie Jacobson was a guy who owned a habit dashie. Now if you’re under the age of probably 70, you might not know what that word is. And so I had to look it up. It’s someone who sells ties in fine clothing. He lived in Kansas and one day Eddie Jacobson got a phone call and it was from a member of the Zionist movement in America.
This was late 1947. And he said, Eddie, we need your help. We are going to the White House constantly to try to meet with President Truman. He will not give us any time of day. We have to have America’s vote of confidence before we declare independence on May 14th in 1948. And so would you please help us a Thai salesman? You might wonder why it does a title salesman have anything to do with this? Well, Eddie Jacobson just happened to be a longtime business partner with Harry Truman. When Harry Truman got out of the military, he became a banker and he and Eddie went into business together. And Truman would not listen to any of the Zionists. He was done with them. You can read this in his diaries. He was tired of them. And so they called Eddie and they said, Eddie, would you go to the White House?
So Eddie goes to the White House in March of 1947, and he pleads with Truman to let in the Zionists Heim Weitzman. At the time, Truman looks and turns around his chair and Eddie Jacobson wasn’t sure what was going to happen. And he turns back around. He said, okay, for you old friend, I’ll do this favor. He meets with m Weitzman. He ends up saying that Heim Weitzman is one of the most brilliant men that he knows, and he throws America’s full weight behind the Zionist movement to create a state of Israel in mandatory Palestine. The Israelis got their vote of confidence and declare independence on May 14th, 1948. Now why I tell you that story is because you might be sitting here tonight at the beginning of a new year at a Shabbat service that is to the Jew first wondering, what is my role to play in this?
And truth be told, I don’t know, but I know God does. And I know that you’re here tonight and you’re showing to him, you’re declaring prophetically, I care about this. Israel’s history is my history. And whether you sell ties or you sell cars or you’re a banker or you’re a lawyer, you’re a politician. God can use you to change the course of redemptive history. All you have to do is be willing. And so my prayer for you tonight as we end this, is that you would see the context of the times that you’re living in. And it would cause you as you begin 2019, to ask, God, Lord, how can I help be a friend of Israel? How can I help build the redemptive plan to see Jewish people come to faith in Yeshua, to stand by the Jewish people, to stand by the nation of Israel to support it in whatever way you lead me to do.
And so can I pray for you tonight as we do that? Because you never know how God is going to lead you. You never know what journey he’s going to take you on. You never know when you’re going to get a phone call in the middle of the night as a title salesman to go meet with the President. And you never know who you might be working with right now that could become the President. You never know what Jewish person you could come across on a street and you could share Yeshua’s love with them in some way that makes sense to them, and it changes their life. And it ends up changing the history of an entire group of people. And so, Lord, we just want to open our hearts to you tonight. We thank you for this history. We thank you that you are moving in the history of the Jewish people and to us really, Lord.
It represents a steadiness that you never forgot through all those years of silence, all those years of Excel, Lord, you never forgot your promise to the Jewish people, to use them, to reach all of us, to graft us into this redemptive plan. And I just pray tonight, Lord, that as we start a new year, would you show us each how we can be a part in building Zion, in building Lord, this redemptive plan to reach the universal through the particular, through the Messianic community, through Israel and through our home here at Gateway Church. And so we just give it all to you, Lord, and you show his name. Amen.