Ezekiel 36 reminds us like many other passages the warnings God gave to Israel.
16 Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, 17 “Son of man, when the house of Israel was living in their own land, they defiled it by their ways and their deeds; their way before Me was like the uncleanness of a woman in her impurity.18 Therefore I poured out My wrath on them for the blood which they had shed on the land, because they had defiled it with their idols. 19 Also I scattered them among the nations and they were dispersed throughout the lands. According to their ways and their deeds I judged them. 20 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.’
Verse 20 the other nations are mocking Israel saying in effect if these are the “chosen” people why are the refugees in our country? John Mcarthur gives us a brief history of the Jewish nation from this point on.
If you look at the picture historically and you trace the story of the Jew, you might conclude that there was little or no advantage at all. Theirs is a sad saga of struggle, of war, captivity and death. They have been hated, persecuted, slandered, imprisoned, slaughtered and this repeatedly through their history. And yet they live on almost defiantly as an indestructible seed. Today rebuilding their small piece of land in the center of the world, they are a noble people made even more noble by their struggles.
But looking at the story of the Jew historically, it would seem that there was little advantage to being Jewish. They were slaves in Egypt for over 400 years under the bondage of Pharaoh who were given the most menial tasks and also they were given circumstances which made those tasks even more difficult. When they were dispossessed from Egypt they wandered in the desert for 40 years until an entire generation of them died off in the wilderness without ever having a home. When they finally entered into the land of Canaan, they had to save themselves from the destruction of the surrounding peoples who constantly attacked them both religiously, morally and in warfare. They were slaughtered and taken captive finally by the Assyrians first and then the Babylonians. From the Assyrian captivity they never returned and from the Babylonian captivity it was 70 years before a remnant began to come back.
After returning from the captivity in Babylon, they set out to rebuild their land from the rubble and were mocked and harassed and hindered and unaided in their efforts. They were dominated by the Greek Antiochus Epiphanes when they were under Greek rule and he took liberties to desecrate their religion, desecrate their priesthood, desecrate their holy place, quell their rebellions by slaughtering many of them. Their babies were massacred by Herod. Their land was oppressed by Roman legions. They were utterly devastated under the power of Rome.
In 70 A.D. the city of Jerusalem was destroyed by Titus Vespasian the great general of the Roman army. One point one million, according to Josephus were murdered, slaughtered. One hundred thousand bodies of the Jews were thrown over the wall in some kind of sport. Two years before that the Gentiles of Caesarea slew 20 thousand Jews and sold thousands more of them into slavery. In a single day the inhabitants of Damascus cut the throats of ten thousand Jews. In the actual siege itself there was devastation beyond description in the city of Jerusalem. One hundred thousand remaining fugitives from that sacking of the city were sold into slavery. Many more died in the gladiator games sponsored by Rome.
In 115 A.D. the Jews of Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus and Mesopotamia rose up against Rome and tried to defeat Rome and were unsuccessful and so Hadrian the Emperor destroyed 985 towns in Palestine and slew at least 600 thousand men. More perished through starvation, through disease and through fire. So many were sold as slaves that their price dropped to that of a horse. The legal code of Theodocious(?), who was the emperor of Rome around 380 A.D. contained ideas of Jewish inferiority and the ideas of Theodocious and Jewish inferiority permeated all of western society and western law in the centuries to follow.
For two centuries they were oppressed under the Byzantines. Heroclitus(?) banished them from Jerusalem in 628 and endeavored to exterminate them again. Leo the Assyrian in around 723 A.D. gave them the choice between Christianity and banishment. When the first crusade was launched in 1096 to recapture the holy places from the Ottoman Turks, the crusaders entered the Jewish settlement of Ansuan(?) and Preton(?) and trampled three thousand Jews to death under their horses’ hooves. And they did it in the name of Christianity.
In 1254 Louis IX banished them from France. In 1306 Philip the Fair expelled 100 thousand of them from the same country. During the scourge of the Black Death in 1348 and 1349 the charge was made that the Black Death or the Great Plague was caused by the Jews who had poisoned the wells and they endeavored to slaughter the Jews and many of them fled to Poland and to Russia.
In 1492 the Jews were expelled from Spain as Columbus was heading to discover America. In 1496 they were expelled from Portugal. Soon after all of western Europe was closed to them except a few spots in northern Italy and Germany, toward the middle of the seventeenth century in Poland, more persecution broke out. And though the French Revolution tended to emancipate some of the European Jews around 1789 or so, Anti‑Semitism continued in many areas and particularly in the Ukrain early in the 1800’s there were massacres of Jews.
I think we all remember the nineteenth century Dreyfus affair in which Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was accused of treason. And an attempt began to oust the Jews from all the higher ranks of the French army. Their only hope for preservation really was the rebirth of Zionism. And it did happen and it rallied the Jewish people so that in 1897 they held their first Zionist congress in Bazel(?). The first little colony of Zionists returned to the land in about 1873 and by 1914 there were 90 thousand Jews in their land, though it wasn’t yet their land. Their identity had been miraculously preserved through this incredible series of massacres through all of the years of their existence.
And, of course, it all came to a horrifying climax in the 1940’s when six million of them were systematically exterminated. And anti‑Semitism was no longer racial as it had been in the Middle Ages, it was…rather no longer religious as it had been in the Middle Ages but it became racial. So that the legacy of all of that today in the world is not that we have a religious anti‑Semitism but we still have what is left of a racial anti‑ Semitism. And Jewish people today find themselves in many cases to be hated, to be slandered, to be defamed, to be misunderstood, to be mocked.
And that brings us to today…
Verse 21 of Ezekiel 36 God says
21 But I had concern for My holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations where they went.
God is doing what he his doing in the land of Israel for his name sake, verse 22 continues the promise we are seeing fulfilled today.
22 “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. 23 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.24 For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land. 25 Then I willsprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols.26 Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. 28 You will live in the land that I gave to your forefathers; so you will be My people, and I will be your God. 29 Moreover, I will save you from all your uncleanness; and I will call for the grain and multiply it, and I will not [j]bring a famine on you. 30 I will multiply the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field, so that you will not receive again the disgrace of famine among the nations. 31 Then you will remember your evil ways and your deeds that were not good, and you will loathe yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities and your abominations. 32 I am not doing this for your sake,” declares the Lord God, “let it be known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, O house of Israel!”
33 ‘Thus says the Lord God, “On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the cities to be inhabited, and the waste places will be rebuilt. 34 The desolate land will be cultivated instead of being a desolation in the sight of everyone who passes by. 35 They will say, ‘This desolate land has become like the garden of Eden; and the waste, desolate and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited.’ 36 Then the nations that are left round about you will know that I, the Lord, have rebuilt the ruined places and planted that which was desolate; I, the Lord, have spoken andwill do it.”
These promises are being fulfilled today. These passages alone in scripture should cause all men to put their faith in God. Unfortunately much like Israel has been in their history, men would rather chase after things of this world rather than pursue the God who created them. Oh that hearts we be awakened to these amazing truths.
Not of this World 