SEVEN POINTS TO UNDERSTANDING ISRAEL, CONT.

7. Accurately Interpreting Today’s Divine Actions Regarding Natural Israel

Undeniably, God has for over a century stirred in the Jewish heart (and prodded the Gentile nations through various exigencies) to lead the Jews back to the Middle East. Yet we’ve fully proven that, 1) the covenantal record dictates this return can’t be about inheriting the Promised Land (the Land title has been transferred to Eternal Israel, the Jews remain subject to the Gentiles, and “flesh and blood cannot inherit” the Promised Land); and 2) today’s events fail to fulfill the prophecies of glorified restoration.

If all this is so—if the Lord is still not at this time “restoring the kingdom to Israel”—then what is He doing?? How can we reasonably understand His Mind behind the massive 20^th century repatriation? This is the last—and perhaps most important—question I must answer.

- The Concept of Pre-Restoration

As intimated already, the only credible prophetic evidence we have for scripturally identifying modern Israel’s regathering is the body of cross-grain prophecies that allow for a separate sub-glorious return short of real restoration. In reconciling this sub-glorious portrait to the one of true restoration, we determined that, while the two returns are not identical, they are joined; and that the sub-glorious return must occur ahead of the true restoration.

As a connected action ahead of true restoration, today’s Jewish repatriation can best be described as an “ante-restoration” or—given natural Israel’s role as a mirror of Eternal Israel—a “shadow restoration.” In this treatise, we will call it The Pre-restoration.

The Pre-restoration prophecies provide valuable clues for giving us the Lord’s Mind behind the modern return. Three elements stand out from this collection. They are that:

1) Israel’s return occurs in unbelief.

2) Israel’s return occurs as a divine disciplinary action under semi-forced conditions of hardship.

3) Israel’s return occurs under divine appeal in which the return with both its blessings and hardships serves as a platform for conducting that appeal.

Isaiah 43, the best “spokesman” for the entire collection, encapsulates these conditions, centering on verses 8 and following:

1 But now, thus says the LORD, your Creator, O Jacob, And He who formed you, O Israel, "Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine! 2 "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; And through the rivers, they will not overflow you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be scorched, Nor will the flame burn you. 5 "Do not fear, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and gather you from the west. 6 "I will say to the north, 'Give {them} up!' And to the south, 'Do not hold {them} back.' Bring My sons from afar and My daughters from the ends of the earth, 8 Bring out the people who are blind, even though they have eyes, And the deaf, even though they have ears. 9 All the nations have gathered together so that the peoples may be assembled. Who among them can declare this and proclaim to us the former things? Let them present their witnesses that they may be justified, or let them hear and say, "It is true." 10 "You are My witnesses," declares the LORD, "And My servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe Me and understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, and there will be none after Me. 22 "Yet you have not called on Me, O Jacob; but you have become weary of Me, O Israel. 25 "I, even I, am the one who wipes out your transgressions for My own sake, And I will not remember your sins. 26 "Put Me in remembrance, let us argue our case together; State your {cause,} that you may be proved right….

Pre-restored Israel is an unbelieving Israel brought back under trial—an Israel with which God is pleading—as one Who brings a court case. (Note Isaiah’s use of the words “witnesses” and “case.”) Verse 9 further indicates that God’s plea ultimately involves the summoning—as if by “subpoena”—of all nations together. All the earth is to become a “courtroom” for a divine pleading centered on Israel in the Land called Palestine / Israel.

This concept of legal pleading becomes the grounding reference for our understanding God’s true purpose behind the Pre-restoration.

- Return to “Square One:” Recreating the Scene of a Crime

Depending on the nature of a court trial, one thing that may be required is to replicate the scenario in which key events occurred. This can happen on the floor of the courtroom using models, staging techniques and expert witnesses. But in rarer cases, it may be necessary for a court to convene at the actual scene of an event. This can be especially true in the case of a crime such as a murder. We call this “returning to the scene of the crime.”²⁷

This has every application to the Jewish repatriation in the context of Isaiah 43.

The immediate effect of the Jews’ return—the return of an unreconciled people accomplished through trial of “fire and water”—has been to forge them once more into a cohesive national body. Isaiah 43 would have us see this national re-formation as the convening of a divine court. The Jewish return is really about the Lord’s summons (subpoena) of Israel for the conducting of a legal hearing.

Isaiah clarifies the purpose of this hearing. It is the Lord’s entry into litigation with Israel over His rightful claim upon them (“You are mine,” He says in 43:1). Seen through regenerative eyes, the focus of this litigation is the issue of the Son and His rightful claim on them by right of New Covenant redemption (“I have redeemed you.”)

But that is not all. The Lord is not just bringing Israel back to the Land for litigation. As the chosen venue for convening this court, God is also using the Promised Land as a staging ground to forensically re-create the scene of Israel’s ancestral rejection of His Son.

More thoughtful consideration of today’s realities shows us that Israel’s return actually “returns” them back to “square one” at the opening of the New Testament. It takes them up from the “basement” of diaspora back to visible “ground level” as a fleshly nation. But that is all. Natural Israel has been “restored” only in the sense of coming back to where they were historically at the time they refused the Messiah.

When Yeshua last presented His claims to Israel nationally, she was under Roman oppression. Today, she is under dominion of the United Nations.²⁸ But restoration to a place under Gentile dominion is not what the prophets promised! Therefore, the present return can only be seen as God’s placement or positioning of the Jews for “picking up” of where He “left off” with them in making His New Covenantal claims on them.

To this day the Jewish people remain subject to the covenantal shift that has governed all men since Calvary. Their time set aside has never exempted them from the gospel demands first issued them as a nation.²⁹ Israel must still enter all the New Covenantal surrenders required by Yeshua before the Jewish people can be regeneratively restored to share heirship of the Land. Nothing about their merely re-convening on the site of the Promised Land changes, circumvents or nullifies this.

Since the requirements have not changed, yet God has brought them back to the Land, then God’s purpose for this return can only be for setting a stage on which to revisit His original gospel demands upon the Jews as a unified people.

From the totality of this vantage, we can easily see that Israel’s summons back to the Promised Land has absolutely nothing to do with their inheriting of the Land. Not yet. God is summoning Israel to a Divine Court of Claims, specifically, His claim on them. He is not summoning them to a Divine Court of Probate for proving their right of claim to the Land based on the Last Will and Testament of Moses (as is so popularly believed now).³⁰

· Forensic Re-Staging: the Unbelief Factor

It requires zero discernment to see that modern Israel has been re-fashioned in unbelief. What does take discernment is to see the significance of that unbelief in terms of the restoration prophecies and to rightly appropriate that perception to identify God’s real purpose in repatriating an unbelieving nation back to the Land.

We’ve just advanced that not only is modern Israel’s return a fulfillment of Isaiah 43:8, but that more fully it forensically re-creates the original stage on which Israel rejected Yeshua. That this is so is ultimately clinched by Yeshua’s own original application of Isaiah’s prophesy to the people of His day:

Mt. 13:13-14 Therefore I speak to them in parables, because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled…

The relationship between Yeshua’s word to Israel here and modern Israel’s return in fulfillment of this same prophecy is critical to proving the truth about today’s return. Yeshua’s application to Israel past tells us that any future return of the Jews contemplated by Isaiah 43 must necessarily find that generation defined by the same unbelief as the generation to whom Yeshua first came.

If so, and if Isaiah 43 applies to today’s return, then everything true about Yeshua’s heart toward unbelieving Israel of His day defines what is true about His heart toward unbelieving Israel today. It means that Israel today is subject to the same mind, the same attitude, the same discriminations of heart from which Yeshua first spoke to Israel—including the same appeals to repentance and the same reproaches for unbelief.

Not only all this, but to top it off—the joint application of Isaiah 43 to Israel past and present means that whatever was true about Israel’s conditions vis-à-vis restoration in Yeshua’s time is what must also be true of them today.

In their unbelieving state at Yeshua’s first coming, Israel was not considered restored even though they occupied the Land. Israel did not consider herself restored. Every Pharisee, priest and prophet was still looking for Israel’s restoration. If so at that time, then neither under today’s forensically re-created conditions of the past can Israel now be considered “restored.”

· Reconstructionist Unbelief: Fulfilling Isaiah 43:8

The reconstructionist mindset on the part of today’s Jews—including so many Messianic believers in Yeshua and even increasingly those from Gentile-origined churches—is but evidence of the very unbelief predicted in Isa. 43:8.

The prophetic mischaracterizing of modern events and Israel’s condition conducted through the reconstructionist agenda itself reinforces the proof that modern Israel’s return fulfills what the sub-glorious—not the glorious— prophecies predict: the return of an unbelieving people unable to hear regenerative truth, rejecting of the calls by regenerative apostles and prophets to repentant heritage denial and transcendent spiritual thinking.³¹

In this way, Jewish and Messianic reconstructionist unbelief is self-fulfilling of the unbelief associated with the sub-glorious picture of Pre-restoration. The reconstructionists of Messianic Judaism are indeed participating in the fulfilling of end time prophecy, but not the prophecy they think they are fulfilling!³²

Nevertheless, using that unbelief for His own ends, God is sovereignly allowing the Jews to re-create the scene of the crime over which He is calling them—and in turn the world—to come to a final verdict.

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Having established that modern Israel’s return is not their restoration, but their forensic reconvening under divine appeal, we can move to study the nature of the “Plaintiff’s” plea in depth.

NEXT – PART 14: PRE-RESTORATION AND THE LORD’S REPENTANCE IMPERATIVE

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