“And I will make of you a great name…And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:2,3)
The
reality that God gave Israel, and only Israel, land has been a source of
covetousness by rival peoples and nations down through time. Yet such jealousy has been based on a
profound misunderstanding of the point of God’s gift of land. The geographical entity of the territory of
Israel was NOT for vacation purposes!
Far from it. Accompanying that
real estate-deed came both enormous responsibility and consternation. God’s purpose for the Israelites for the
world was that they would act as His mouth-piece for the surrounding nations
and it was for that reason that He placed them at the crossroads between the
three major continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe. God’s reasoning for this location is quite
apparent to anyone looking at a globe of planet Earth. The populace of civilizations are, in
general, never content to stay put.
Major trade routes between nations stretched all the way from Egypt to
both Assyria in the northeast and Europe to the northwest. This ensured that Israel would never be
either isolated or unnoticed. Its very
location made it extremely valuable to the neighboring civilizations just named. Renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright
described Israel’s circumstances as follows:
“Every forty years out of the last four thousand on average,
an army has rushed through [Israel] , whether to conquer it, to rescue it from
someone else, to use it as a neutral battleground on which to fight another
army, or to take advantage of it as a neutral route for getting some-where else
to fight there instead.”[1]
It is really vital for you to
understand that there were numerous crises in Israel’s history. But in the Bible two catastrophes stand out
as being the most fundamental of all. The
first occurred around 587 BC when King Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian army
destroyed the first Temple in Jerusalem and took Israel as captives to the city
of Babylon for seventy years. The second
happened in 70 AD when the Roman army under General Titus utterly destroyed the
third temple, its foundation, and its surroundings which led to the complete
end of the Jewish sacrificial system once and for all. The gold that melted in the destruction was
officially collected by the army to fund the Roman Colosseum. Yet even though in both cases these events
were predicted to end Israel’s belief in God, they did not.
As for the first of the two events,
they instead realized that God had promised the first Temple’s demise if the
Israelites did not repent of their disobedience. And in fact they turned from their former
idolatry once and for all. Not only
that, after their release from Babylon, Israelites move to many other places in
the ancient world as a further means to bear witness to the true and living
God. And as for the second of the two,
the destruction of the third Temple (built by Herod the Great), it occurred
only after the death and resurrection of Jesus.
The point is, since Jesus dealt with the sins of the world once and for
all at Golgotha (Romans 6:10), the Temple was no longer necessary to atone for
our sins. Indeed, it is also the case
that the train of persecutions which followed for several centuries under an
oppressive Roman government led
ultimately to its own destruction while the Christian Church grew and grew in
numbers, clearly because of God’s ongoing oversight.
I do not expect that these truths
will remove our every anxiety about the present times in our nation. But I pray that you will be encouraged by the
presence of God in the words of Psalms 2 and 46.
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