At the 50th anniversary of Israeli statehood, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in an interview during the festivities, “I think Israel is the greatest success story of the 20th century, and in many ways, it is the greatest triumph of a people of all the nations of history.” We agree. The return of the Hebrew nation to Israel is as great a story in the annals of history as is the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt. We cannot agree with the Prime Minister when he declared that it is a triumph of the people. It is not a triumph of the people. This is God’s triumph fought in the open-air arena of prophecy where the entire world could look on and witness the miraculous and mighty arm of God in action. It has now been 60 years since the inception of the Israeli state, after 2,500 years Israel has been resurrected into a nation with its capital city,  Jerusalem, this being one of the greatest and surest signs that Jesus Christ is about to return from heaven to earth.

Included in the month-long celebrations during that jubilee celebration were memorials to honor the 18,748 who died defending the nation as well as a slew of ceremonies remembering the day in May 1948 when 25 members of the quasi-political group of Jewish leaders calling itself the National Council met in Tel-Aviv to sign the newly drafted “Declaration of Independence”.

Led by a short white-haired man named David Ben Gurion these men and women seized the moment. The British Empire had tucked its tail and ran, only abruptly announcing that they would be withdrawing as “Protectorate”  of Palestine in a few days; and the scramble for power was on. The Arabs, unprepared for the abrupt vacuum of power so quickly created, hesitated. David Ben Gurion and his fellow patriots did not. As history tells it, Ben Gurion convinced his fellow Jews that they should act boldly and swiftly to immediately form a Jewish state. Within twenty-four hours of the declaration for Jewish statehood, President Truman gave US diplomatic support and the Egyptians began bombing Jewish strongholds in Palestine. Miraculously, the Jews went on to win the battle and then the war and were able to secure borders for their fledgling state. It was all a miracle – from the beginning to end.

Haim Shapira, one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence said later, “I felt I was living the words of Psalm 126: ‘When the Lord caused us to return to Zion, we were as dreamers.’ It was a dream which we had never believed would come true in our lifetime. A miracle had happened.”

The American born school teacher from Chicago, Golda Meir, was also among the elite group of signatories and later became prime minister, said of that time: “Whatever price any of us would have to pay for it; we had recreated the Jewish national home. The long exile was over. Now we were a nation like other nations, masters – for the first time in 20 centuries – of our own destiny.”

Ironically, she was precisely correct. Israel was being restored to the land, but in spirit they were like the other nations. The time of them becoming God’s nation in the full sense of the meaning will have to await the actual return of Christ, their true and everlasting King of kings. They had become ‘like the other nations’ just as when that made the disastrous decision 3,000 years ago ending the time of the Judges when they rejected God as their head of state and demanded that God make them a ‘kingdom’ under the rule of a king of their choosing.

Like Golda Meir, the Jewish nation as a whole believes that their will has brought Israel into existence. But the truth is that the Jews are not masters of their own destiny and never have been. – God is. What has happened is simply a matter of God keeping His reiterated promise made to them over three and a half millennia ago.

The Jews did not return to their homeland under their own impetus or genius. We celebrate God’s sovereignty over all the events of history. The Jews were compelled to go “home” by a series of miracles orchestrated by God in accordance to what the prophets of old had said would occur. Starting with Moses 3,500 years ago and running through the prophets of the Old Testament, the theme of a return of Jews, who were scattered throughout the world, has been consistently and dramatically preached in the Bible. Its fulfillment had taken so long that even the most faithful servants on earth had begun to believe that its interpretation must be spiritually applied to the Church and that Israel would never again return to the land promised to them by God. But in His time and according to His perfect plan God has made it happen. Its fulfillment is so dramatic that no honest heart can deny its voice of the power and presence of God in the affairs of Man.

It took persecutions, World War II and an awful holocaust for the Jews to migrate back. Only such catastrophic things could have ever moved an entire people to leave the security and convenience of the lives they had built for themselves in every nation of the world to converge on a tiny desert wilderness barren from centuries of neglect. The prophets had told of the day of this revival of a  nation and we have seen it come to pass with our own eyes;  and for this we glorify God!

The prophet Joel (3:1-3) foretold of it; Zephaniah (3:17-20) had a vision of it; Isaiah (10:20-22) saw it and he wrote about it in chapter 51: “Therefore the redeemed of the LORD shall return, and come with singing unto Zion; and everlasting joy shall be upon their head: they shall obtain gladness and joy; and sorrow and mourning shall flee away.”

The prophet Jeremiah proclaimed the return of Jews in chapter 30: “For, lo, the days come saith the LORD, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith the LORD: and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.”Ezekiel was given an entire vision of the return and the revival process. The vision in chapter 37, known as the dry bones vision, is the classic prophecy of the Jews’ miraculous return after centuries of dispersion.

“The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones…
 And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest…
 Thus saith the Lord unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live:
 And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.
 So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone.
 And when I beheld lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.
 Then he said unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army.
 Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.
 Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.
 And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves,
 And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: thus shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it, saith the LORD.”

The fulfillment of the return we celebrate, but we cannot celebrate Jewish false hopes for there is more to come. We do not share in the excitement of Prime Minister Meir when she exclaimed, Now we are a nation like other nations! For this was exactly the opposite of God’s true intent for His chosen seed, and remains so today, that Israel should be separate and unlike any other people, set aside as His inheritance. Yet, Christians can celebrate this landmark of prophetic history because Jesus prophesied that the return of Israel to the Promised Land would signal His close return (see Matt 24, Mark 13, Luke 21). Referring to Israel as a fig tree He said, “Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet tender and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things (mentioned before in Matt. 24, Mark 13, Luke 21) know that it (my return) is near, even at the doors. Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.”

We rejoice because Jesus heavily implies here that once Israel becomes a state again His return will happen within a generation. If God is counting a generation as 70 or 80 years then how close must the world be to the Rapture and the beginning of the last period of judgment before Christ’s return which the prophet Daniel reported as the 70th and last week of Israel’s salvation story, what Jeremiah has called the time of Jacob’s Trouble?

We rejoice because the re-creation of Israel as a nation is one of the greatest miracles of history. It is God’s triumph. It is a testimony to the truth of Bible prophecy, no matter how long it takes. It gives us reason to look up knowing that our redemption is drawing nearer and nearer with every breath we take.