This evening, if you have your Bibles, turn again to chapter 37. We want to pick up where we left off last week, last Sunday. We were looking at verses 15 through the end of the chapter.
We got through the portion of the first half, about the first half of that portion of the Scripture where it talks about the nation of Israel was driven into captivity by God because of their rebellion and unbelief as two separate nations, the northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah, a hundred years apart. But Ezekiel is told that they’re coming back as one. And they’re coming back together as one nation.
And then we’re going to see the final outcome of what’s going to be happening at the conclusion of their coming back. And we’re going to be looking at that this evening as well as I just want to give you a brief overview of how things are going so much faster in what God’s promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the descendants of Israel, and the gathering together of the nation and the events that will surround it in the last time. Let’s just read once again from verse 15 to the end of the chapter for context.
And then we’ll be taking a look at this.
Ezekiel 37:15-28
15 The word of the Lord came again unto me, saying, 16 Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel his companions: 17 and join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand.
18 And when the children of thy people shall speak unto thee, saying, Wilt thou not shew us what thou meanest by these? 19 Say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his fellows, and will put them with him, even with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in mine hand. 20 And the sticks whereon thou writest shall be in thine hand before their eyes. 21 And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land: 22 and I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all: 23 neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwellingplaces, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God. 24 And David my servant shall be king over them; and they all shall have one shepherd: they shall also walk in my judgments, and observe my statutes, and do them. 25 And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers have dwelt; and they shall dwell therein, even they, and their children, and their children’s children for ever: and my servant David shall be their prince for ever. 26 Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them: and I will place them, and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore. 27 My tabernacle also shall be with them: yea, I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 28 And the heathen shall know that I the Lord do sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary shall be in the midst of them for evermore.
My tabernacle also shall be with them, yea, I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And the heathen shall know that I the Lord do sanctify Israel, when my sanctuary shall be in the midst of them for ever more. Let’s just bow in prayer.
Lord I pray that you just speak to us through your word again this evening, and help us to understand the significance of this being fulfilled even in the day in which we live, as we see things happening, and the rate of things happening is increasing, and Lord we look for the day of your return. Lord I pray that you would just speak to us through your word tonight, and help us to be greatly encouraged, as we see the prophecy that you gave to Ezekiel about what you would do with the nation of Israel, is being fulfilled in our day. This we ask in Jesus name, Amen.
One of the things you have to do is look at history, and a lot of Christians don’t know history. A lot of people don’t know history. If you look at one of the things that Satan likes to do, is he likes people not to remember what has happened, and look back at history, and see how God has worked in the past, so that we know how God was working today in our lives, and how he will work in the future.
One of the things that the nation of Israel was constantly encouraged by the Lord, and those that were his shepherds, and his prophets that would encourage the people to do, was to teach their children about the past. And remember on Sunday morning, those of you who were here remember we read Psalm 78. In Psalm 78, one of the things and purposes of the Psalm, is to give and show the history of the nation of Israel, and how God worked throughout the history of Israel, providing miraculous things as Israel needed them, delivering them out from the hand of their enemies, in spite of the fact that they were rebellious, stiff-necked people, and were often rebelling and sinning against him.
But God was faithful to his word, to his promises, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and as he was faithful in the lives of the nation of Israel at the time of the psalmist, and before that, we see that he has been faithful even to the word of Ezekiel, and the promises that we are seeing in the day in which we live. I just wanted to give you a little recap, after the Sunday afternoon service, the question was asked, well, when did some of this start happening? And Roberta gave kind of a quick recount of some of the events that have happened in history, most recent history, to bring the Jewish people back into the land of Israel. I want you to understand that God is speeding up the return of the Jews to Israel, and he has been speeding it up in our lifetime.
My parents were married in 1945. Israel wasn’t even a nation in 1945. It had only been about, it would have been about 60 years prior to that, that there was a real strong move in Europe to really think about going back and creating their own land.
And that all came at the end of the 1800s, and some significant things began to happen. And I want you to know what’s happening. Satan’s got his plan on how he’s going to war against God, but God’s got his plan laid out that he’s had laid out since the foundation of the world to defeat Satan.
And he is going to defeat Satan. He defeated him at Calvary, where he gained victory over sin and death. But he’s ultimately going to judge Satan and sin at the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And before that happens, he’s going to fulfill all his promises to Israel. Well, there’s some interesting things that begin to happen at the end of the 1800s. First of all, England, which today, for the English government today, to a large extent, is becoming very anti-Semitic.
And the nation of England is becoming anti-Semitic, as more and more Muslims have poured in, and people seem to adapt to some of their philosophies, especially when it comes to the Jewish people. Well, it wasn’t always that way in England. And in the late portions of the 1800s and in the early portions of the 1900s, England became very supportive of Israel.
And in specific, there was a prime minister, and his name was Lloyd George. And he was the prime minister of England in the same time that Lord Belfer was, Lord Belfer’s actual title was, if I can find where I wrote it down, he was foreign secretary for the government of Prime Minister George. They were both pro-Israel.
And so that was happening on a political scene in England. At the same time, a few years earlier than that, you had things happening on the main continent of Europe, and much of that was being driven by a man whose name was Theodor Herzl. Now, Theodor Herzl was an interesting fellow.
Theodor Herzl was a journalist, and he was also a lawyer. And he wrote for publications throughout Europe. And he wrote about the events that he was seeing.
And some of the things that he began to see, as I mentioned on Sunday afternoon, was a rise in anti-Semitism, where their people were beginning to become much more persecuting of the Jewish people. The Lord laid on Theodor Herzl’s heart, I believe he did, that they needed to have their own homeland. And so he started what is referred to as the modern day Zionist movement.
And just so you know, in the church today, and in much of the world today, they say Zionists are horrible. Well, I want you to know Zionism is biblical. Where does Zion come from? It comes from Mount Zion, which is God’s mountain, which is in the midst of God’s land, where God’s temple will rest, and where God will rule and reign one day.
Why are people so negative towards Zion? Why do they hate the Jews? Because it all points to the coming of Jesus, and where He’s going to rule and reign. So Satan automatically wants to keep the world in looking down upon the Jewish people, and looking down upon Israel, because Satan doesn’t want the people to really look for the Lord, or give their hearts to Him. Well, what Theodor Herzl did, is he began to develop a group of people that were trying to promote that the Jewish people would go back to the land that was theirs.
And he referred to that as Zion. And so he started to encourage people to go back. Well, some things were happening in Europe at that time as well.
There’s always been a large Jewish population in Russia. And there’s really been five aliyahs, or returns of the Jewish people to Israel, since the late 1800s. And the first one occurred shortly before World War I. And I want you to see that events, and if you look at the world wars, and you look at the wars that are going on, a lot of times the world, those that would want to govern the world, use war to enrich themselves and gain more power.
As a matter of fact, the Masons, who are very occultic in the foundation of their belief system, have said there’s going to be another world war, and at the end of the third world war, then their man, who will be Satan’s man, will come to power. So wars have been a thing that they’ve always used. In the United States, Satan’s people, were really instrumental.
You had in the Catholic Church, you had, I just lost their name, the Jesuits, who were promoting the Civil War. They were promoting, they wanted the destruction of America. And they were behind, and instrumental in some of the things that happened to promote that war of coming about.
And evil forces have always prospered from wars, but at the same time, God will work through wars to accomplish his purposes. Where Satan is trying to destroy what God would have, God will use that for good to those that he has called as his own. Well, what happened is, the things in Europe were beginning to get very ugly prior to World War I. And there was threats, and there was, as we have today, there was alliances between different nations.
And the thing that started World War I was when the Australian, Austrian rather, Duke, was assassinated. And then there was other European nations that had aligned with Austria. And there were those that aligned with the nations that were supporting and you had the clash of the war.
Well, what was going on in Russia is that the Jewish people were beginning to be persecuted. Under Stalin, which came about 40 years later, there was strong persecution against the Jewish people. And most people don’t know that Stalin persecuted Jews just about as bad as Hitler did.
It’s just that he killed more Russians than Hitler did. Hitler didn’t kill the German people as much, but Stalin killed not only Jews, but he killed Russians. He killed everybody.
He was just a wicked, evil man. But the persecution had already begun. And so the first Aliyah occurred in the late 1800s, where you had a handful of Jewish people.
It wasn’t a great amount. It was just a few thousand Jewish people that moved back to, at that time, was a barren wasteland that had been the land of Israel given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There was a second Aliyah that occurred.
And that Aliyah occurred right prior to the war breaking out. And then a few more thousand Jews went. Now, at the same time that all this was happening, you had in England Lord Belfort and David Lloyd George, who were very pro-Israel, and they began to put together the fact that the nation of Israel, or the people of the Jewish people needed a land of their own.
And they began to look at that needs to happen. Well, interesting things began to happen because you had political things going on in the world, just like you got political things today. And you had the Ottoman Empire, which was coming to an end.
And World War I, as it broke out, there’s alliances between the Arabs and the Germans at that time. The Ottomans and the Germans aligned. And the Jewish people that were in Israel, they began to align with the other side.
And so you already began to have this division. It was going to grow greater during the Second World War. Now, as you see this, the Lord said, I’m going to bring the people back into the land.
And people were… Back when my grandparents were living, which they were young when all these events were going on, there was no Israel per se in the world picture. And there was just a small number of Jewish people that had returned to the land. And the land was still very desolate.
But what we see happening is God is bringing more and more people back. And what Satan is doing to try and get the world to rebel against God, God is using to draw his people back into the land. Well, we see that the Belfort Declaration was made in November 2nd, 1917.
And that was a declaration that was written by Lord Belfort where he said that the nation of Israel needed to have their own land. They referred to it as Palestine. And it would be referred to as Palestine.
And that’s where even today people use the misnomer and refer to it as Palestine. It should have never been called Palestine. It should have been called Israel.
But they used the takeoff on the name that had been given to it as we mentioned before by Titus and the Roman Empire where they called it Syria-Palestina because the Philistines were the main enemies of the Jewish people. And so consequently, they shortened that to Palestine. And they said that the Jewish people should be able to have their own land and it should be called Palestine.
And initially, there was talk of having them go to somewhere in Africa and have their own nation there. But that’s not where God said he’s going to send them, right? And he’d already started calling people back into what today is Israel. And that notion was put down and so in the Balfour Declaration, it said that the land would be overseen at the end of the war, World War I, the Ottoman Empire lost and the British, along with the French, were given the mandate and you’ve all heard of the British mandate.
Well, the British mandate was that they were to be overseers of the Middle East along with France. And so they began to try and determine how the land should be divided up. Then comes World War II.
Now, it’s interesting what happened. The third Aliyah began in 1923 right after World War I. And at that time, there were more Jews that went back and the Balfour Declaration had been declared. The British mandate had been established and they were talking of making a homeland for Israel.
Well, the third Aliyah occurred then. Then between 1924 and 1929, the fourth main Aliyah or return to the land by the Jews occurred. And once again, this began to occur because in Europe, a lot of times people think it was just the Germans that were persecuting the Jews.
Well, before Hitler came to power, the Polish were persecuting the Jews. Before the Polish persecuted the Jews, the Russians were persecuting the Jews. And all of this anti-Semitism that was developing in Europe began to drive people back.
And the Polish from 1924 through 1929 were the main ones that drove the Jewish people out of Poland and they began to go back to Israel. But again, it wasn’t in huge numbers. The largest number would come in the fifth Aliyah, which occurred when the Nazis began to rise to power in Germany.
And you had Jewish people that actually saw what was happening, saw the depth of the anti-Semitism and they left and over 50,000 of them left before World War II, just before World War II started, left Germany. And they were some of the blessed ones because they didn’t lose their families in concentration camps. They weren’t placed in prisons and they didn’t have to be turned away from the shores after the war was done by the British or turned away from America’s shores during the war by the Americans.
But the depth of the anti-Semitism grew to its highest pitch during the Nazi reign and during Hitler’s reign. And that’s right before that is when the fifth Aliyah occurred. During the war, the Jews were looking for a place and now they begin to see one that had.
But if you’ve ever seen some of the movies that have been made about the events right before and during World War II and what was happening in Israel and the Arab nations around there, one deals with, oh man, I’ve just lost the title. Bert, can you help me on it? The two movies that were made dealing with helping with the Arabs and not the Jews, we’ve watched them. But right after the war, during the war, during World War II, the thing that was happening is you pick sides and the Jewish people were on the Allies’ sides.
They were on the side with England, America and the Arabs were on the side of the Germans. And you had already conflict coming between those people in the Middle East who were Arabs and Jews and the head mafti of Jerusalem at the time, I believe it was Yasser Arafat’s uncle. He would have been Egyptian actually, but he called himself a Palestinian or Yasser Arafat called himself a Palestinian.
But his uncle met with Hitler on ways that they could exterminate the Jews. During the war, there was a group that was called the Palestinian Brigade. And the Palestinian Brigade had no Arabs in it.
It was all Jewish people. And up until Yasser Arafat said, I’m Palestinian. There was the Palestinian Post, which was the Jerusalem Post today.
It was a Jewish newspaper. And the reference to Palestinians was Jews because it went back to the Balfour Declaration, which was in reference to the Jews and called the land Palestine going back to Rome. Now, if you look at what’s happened since then.
Well, following the war, you begin to have another big, probably the biggest influx of Jews up to that time into the nation of Israel. And England and France were fulfilling their mandate and they begin to divide the land up. And the movies I was referring to deal with that period of time.
And the English were friends with the Arabs. And they really, there were some like General Allenby was very, very pro-Israel and did everything he could to help Israel. But a lot of the English leadership at that time was anti-Jew and pro-Arab.
And they begin to divide the land up and it wasn’t even given according to original homelands. For example, today, you still see the impact of how they divided it up just by favors to sheiks, the Arab sheiks in the land who had fallen in favor with them. And, for example, in Iraq, in Turkey, and in Iran, you have Kurdish groups.
Well, the Kurds are the Medes. And if you look at where they’re all at in the northern portions of those areas, that’s where the Medes used to be as a nation. But they weren’t given their own nation, even though that should have been their nation because it was their homeland.
Instead, it was divided up into Syria, Turkey, the northern portion, Iraq, and Iran. And so you have Kurds stretched all across there today. And you still have fighting going on between tribes up in that area with the Kurds that are Arab tribes that have become Muslims.
And the Kurds have become Muslims, but they’re a different type of Muslims. They’re more like the Druze. They’re not anti-Israel, and they’re not anti-US.
And they’re more pro-Western. And really, if you look at the history of the Kurds and the Persian people, they’ve always been open to supporting the Jewish people. But it’s the Muslims’ influence that has caused them to become anti-Semitic.
Well, what happened during this time is Israel was still kind of the odd guy out. But then the UN declared that they should have their own land. And so the British were given the instructed to divide the land and give a portion to Israel.
And they gave them, initially they gave them much more than they finally got when they became a nation. But then they started carving it out as the Arabs were complaining. And it became to look much like much of Israel does today, except they’ve gained some back in the wars that was originally given to them.