Ezekiel Predicts the Rebirth of the Nation of Israel
We as human beings often have what I’d call pendulum belief systems. All I mean by this statement is that we often tend to place all our marbles on one side of any issue. An example of this mentality maybe something like how we attain salvation. Most Christian would say that how we live has absolutely nothing to do with getting into heaven, or that it has everything to do with it. Because of this mentality I believe we often fall into error because most likely both sides of an issue have parts of truth in them. The mixing of the truth from both sides of the issue create what we call “paradoxes” in our thinking. Paradoxes are “things that seem to contradict themselves on the surface, yet in reality they make perfect sense, or in other words “the truth lies in the middle”. An example of a paradox could be a statement such as “War is bad and good”. Some might argue with this statement claiming that there isn’t any good in war, but I believe that the ending of the holocaust, ending of slavery in our country, the rebuilding of the nation of Israel, as well as other good things have come out of past wars. Another of these paradoxes is “Christian Faith”. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Or in other words faith is believing in what God says, even without seeing it. However we can also see that Jesus never taught us to have a “blind” faith, or a faith without facts, or even in spite of the facts. John 9 tells us a story of a man who had a different kind of faith. Basically when the Pharisees questioned a man Jesus healed of blindness he answers essentially with, Listen as for his teachings I don’t know, and where he comes from I don’t know, all I do know is I was once blind, but now I see. We do not need to be afraid to think, and study history, science, or any other subject if we’ve got questions. Questions are good and should be explored. Having questions and searching is not a lack of faith, but we must also understand that if we wait until we have all the answers, time will run out and we will waste our lives. Personally I wasn’t someone who needed questions answered before I gave my life to Jesus. I met Jesus and allow him to answer my questions as I go through life. Maybe an example of this faith will be of use to you. If I need to buy a car, it would be good do research to find the right car, but no matter how much research I do before I make the decision to buy that car I still must have faith because I do not know for sure that this car will be a good purchase. The Christian faith is “true”, the bible is “true” and in spite what you hear from the many skeptics that try and try to disprove the truth of our faith; truth will still reign in the end. And for today’s bible study my plain and heart is to give you yet another example of how amazingly true and accurate our bible is. I hope to again inspire you to see that we don’t blindly follow the teaching of the bible, or Jesus simply hoping its truth, history, science and life in general are there to show it is too.
Imagine if I wrote down on a piece of paper that something was going to happen in 2,500 years. This thing that is going to happen has never, ever happened before, but I give you the exact date that it will happen. Is there any way that you would call this a coincidence? Probably not, because the chance of this happening would be so incredibly slim. Well we’re going to talk about this exact thing happening in the bible. We start in the book of Ezekiel, chapter 4 verses 4-6,
“Then lie on your left side, and place the punishment of the house of
Israel upon it. For the number of the days that you lie on it, you shall bear their punishment. 5For I assign to you a number of days, 390 days, equal to the number of the years of their punishment. So long shall you bear the punishment of the house of Israel. 6And when you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the punishment of the house of Judah. Forty days I assign you, a day for each year.”
Let me take a step back for a second, two times in the Old Testament God tells the Jewish people that they will be taken captive. The first is recorded in Ex. 12:41 where it tells them that the Egyptians will take them captive for 430 years. And guess what the Egyptians took them captive for exactly 430 years. The second time is found in Jeremiah 25:11 where their told that they would be taken captive by the Babylonians for 70 years. And sure enough they were. During the time of this second captivity three famous prophets lived Daniel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Daniel and Ezekiel both made prophecies about the restoration of the Jews. Daniel boldly showed the time when the Babylonians would release the Jews to return home in 70 years, and knowing that prophecy, Ezekiel shares what the Lord showed him about a completely different restoration, Ezekiel shares that the Lord would restore the Jewish “Nation” after 430 years of punishment. History agrees that in the year 606 B.C. the Babylonian army invaded Israel and took the Jew’s captive. And just as Daniel and Jeremiah predicted 70 years later (536 B.C.) on the first day of the month of Nissan King Cyrus frees Jews (Ezra 1:3). Doing the quick math this would tell us according to Ezekiel’s prophecy that in the year (606 B.C + 430 years) 176 B.C. the Jewish Nation should’ve been restored. And anyone who knows much about history knows that this did not happen. In fact we know from the New Testament that the Jew’s believe the Messiah would come along and be the one to restore the Jewish Nation. So because of this many skeptics have claimed this prophecy was wrong and there fore just another example of the “many” errors recorded in the bible. But in the middle of the 1980’s a man named Grant Jeffrey’s published his theory on this prophecy and it has yet to be publicly disproved. Mr. Jeffrey added another bible verse to the equation which brought out a whole other factor. Lev. 26:18 tells the Jews that if they remained disobedient during their punishment, God would multiply their punishment by 7. In the year 536 B.C. King Cyrus released the Jewish people to go to their home land, but having been in Babylon for 70 years most Jew’s were well rooted in Babylon and refused to go home. In fact both Ezra and Nehemiah record that Ezra lead a small portion of the Jews back to the promise land while a large majority (around 95%) remained in Babylon disobedient to God. They worship the pagan gods, and remained in their sins. So because of this God held to his word and multiplied their punishment by 7. Now let’s do the math. The Jew’s were taken captive by the Babylonians in 606 B.C. The were released by King Cyrus 70 years later in 536 B.C. leaving 360 years of punishment. Taking that 360 years and multiplying it by 7 because of their disobedience we would come to 2,520 years. Here we run into another snag in the calculations. A biblical year is not equal to our modern calendar years. The Jewish calendar has 360 days per year compared to our modern calendar which has 365 years. All ancient civilization determine their year based on the moon, where as we use the sun. So to accurately get the right date we must find out the amount of days this would equal in the biblical year. To do that we take 2,520 years x 360 day biblical years to = 907,200 biblical year days. Now to translate this into modern years we need to take 907,200 biblical year days and divide them by 365.25 which is the days’ in the modern calendar years. This equals 2,483.8 modern calendar years. Hoping you all were able to follow that we must take one more matter into consideration, there was no year 0 in between 1B.C. and 1 A.D. Taking all of this into consideration when we add 2483.8 years on to what we know from the Jewish Calendar is 1 Nissan 536 B.C. we come to May 15th 1948. At 12:00 a.m. on this exact date the nation of Israel after being punished for over 2,500 years became a recognized nation once again. Never before has anything like this happened, and this is simply one of the numerous miracles in which occurred in the God giving the Jews their own nation once again. Check it out, let God be true and every man a liar. Don’t be afraid of searching out God, he promises to draw near to those who draw near to him, and he has called us to know him and about him too.
Justin had requested a place on this blog to express thoughts and opinion’s. Here is a chance, if you’d like to give me, or share with us your thoughts. Just click on “comments” at the bottom of this post, and type till your hearts content. I look forward to hearing from you all.
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