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Approximately 2500 years ago the Prophet Ezekiel (Chaps. 38-39) foretold that in the last days God would bring the children of Israel back as a nation, from all the lands wherein they had been scattered. After this ingathering occurs, he further prophesied that a great nation to the north of Israel would invade this tiny nation as a prelude to God's judgment. Most scholars have identified this attacker as Russia!! We are now standing in one of the most decisive moments in all of world history. Israel, now reborn, stands today a tiny David facing many Goliaths: though loved and hated, her existence cannot be ignored! Hardly a day goes by but that we see the front pages of our newspapers heralding another Israeli-Arab peace treaty -- or worse still, some terrorist catastrophe. Our secular press can report only the turbulence and struggle the camera records, while serious Bible scholars discern in these events the very fulfillment of the prophetic oracles.
It is high time that we recognize that the New Testament is not just a Christian document, but is primarily a Jewish testimony, written by Jews, to Jews, attesting to the fulfillment by Christ as a Jew, to the Messianic legacy. So here we stand, teetering right now at the brink of the darkest day in all of Jewish history. The malignancy of Adolph Hitler and the centuries of Anti-Semitic persecutions throughout the dark ages by so-called Christians will be dwarfed by the holocaust Daniel the Prophet, Paul the Apostle, and Jesus predicted the soon-to-be revealed Anti-Christ will unleash upon Israel. He will rise to prominence by flatteries and peace, only to give the Judas kiss to a nation so torn, so weary, so desperate for tranquillity. On His way to the cross, Jesus told the women of Jerusalem: "Weep not for me, but for yourselves, and for your children." In Luke (19 v. 42) Jesus had wept over Jerusalem crying. "If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes." Continuing in verse 44, He exclaimed, "because thou knew not the time of thy visitation." Now, the Three Wise Men, Herod the king, John the Baptist's parents, and many others, knew about when Jesus would come: for Daniel the Prophet had predicted that God had ordained seventy sevens or 490 years in which he would complete His work of Redemption for all men, through the Jewish people. In Daniel (9, vs. 24-25) it states: "Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy. Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto Messiah the Prince, shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall even in troublous times. And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for Himself." This predicted Christ's sacrificial death when John the Baptist would later declare: "Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." Jesus came as the Passover Lamb, prefigured in the Old Testament by Moses, when the blood of the Lamb was placed on the doorways in Egypt to keep away the Angel of Death. You see, anyone who knew the prophecies of Daniel could calculate the very days when Jesus would be revealed and sacrificed, to fulfill the Mosaic laws demands; it would be exactly 483 years after the issuing forth of the decree to rebuild Jerusalem. Now this decree was given by King Artaxerxes in 445 B.C. to Nehemiah (Neh. 2, vs
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