Luke 13:30

SALVATION OF THE JEWS

Luke 13:30. “ Behold, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.” The Jews had long stood at the front of the world. Because they rejected Christ they were relegated to the rear, the Gentiles coming to the front, where they are today. Yet we see from this, and in innumerable promises in both Testaments, that the fallen children of Abraham are coming back into the kingdom of God, to take their place as in days of yore; however, these promises are restricted to the elect few, as in the case of the Gentiles. The prophetic eye of Jesus, looking through the rolling centuries, saw the desolation of the land, the destruction of that generation, the survival of His race, the final return of the elect, restoration of the land, and the conversion of His people down at the end of the Gentile age; as here He says that the Jews will be the last to receive the gospel, and (Ezekiel 37) that they will be gathered back in their unregenerate state i.e., “valley of dry bones” involving the conclusion that the elect children of Abraham will return to the Holy Land before there is a general conversion of them to Christianity, which will be the last great evangelistic work of the Gospel Age. The universal commotion among the Jews, and their rapid return to the Holy Land despite the most formidable difficulties, is a certain prophetic omen that the end of all things is nigh. Earth and hell are combined to prevent the return of the Jews, the Mohammedan-Turkish Government doing everything in her power to keep them out, passing laws forbidding their citizenization in that country, and permitting them only to visit it as sojourners thirty days, under the most rigid and tyrannical restrictions. This law passed the Porte, A. D. 1874, when there were only about five thousand Jews in all the Holy Land. Despite all their tyrannical restrictions, there are now two hundred thousand, and coming rapidly all the time. I especially investigated this subject, and have it from the most reliable sources. It is not much known, as the Jews have to keep the matter secret. In Jerusalem alone there are fifty-five thousand Jews, one-half of the whole population; besides, they have great, growing, and flourishing colonies at Janneh, Safed (Sah-fed, old Chorazin), Nazareth, Shechem, Caesarea, Joppa, Hebron, Bethlehem, Ekron, Ashdod, Tiberias, and many other places. The attention of all Christendom is now being called to the consideration of restoring to the Jews their own country, which God gave them, and it is going to be done very soon. If you will attend the “wailing of the Jews” without the temple, at the west end (as it is a penalty of death for a Jew to put his foot inside the holy Temple Campus), and hear their weeping and wailing, down on their knees, kissing the great stones which Solomon put in the temple, reading from their Hebrew Bible the promises of God to hear their cries from every land of their dispersion and gather them back to their holy land and city, methinks you would conclude that the answer is nigh. I know not when, in all my life, I have so vividly realized the presence of God as when I attended those wailings. I verily felt that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was listening to the cry of His unfortunate children, and do believe that the answer is now coming from Heaven for the gathering of Israel from every land and nation. How wonderfully the Jews make that country bud and blossom, and again bend beneath the delicious fruits and luxurious crops of which we read in the Bible, sounding in our ears like paradoxes!