Israel’s Future Restoration Vindicates God’s Holiness :: By Jonathan Brentner

The certainty of the Lord fulfilling His oft-repeated promise to restore the fortunes of Israel displays His holy character as a covenant-keeping God. As such, it assures us of our “blessed hope” in Jesus’ appearing (Titus 2:11-13).

You might think I am at least a bit out of my mind for making such statements. How could I possibly say that Israel’s future restoration vindicates God’s holiness? Does that not seem rather extreme for even an avid premillennialist as myself? And how could it possibly have anything to do with our future deliverance as New Testament saints?

I begin the defense of my sanity with what the Lord Himself said in Ezekiel 36:22-24:

“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 the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land.”

Ezekiel tells us that God’s future outpouring of blessings on the Jewish people has nothing to do with their goodness. In His own words, the Lord says that He will act “for the sake of my holy name” and to “vindicate the holiness of my great name.” In other words, the Lord’s keeping of His promise to restore a kingdom to Israel vindicates His holiness.

There’s much more at stake here than just the future restoration of a kingdom for Israel. The keeping of His covenants with and promises to Israel sets God apart from all other objects of worship. It first proves His ability to keep His word; and second, it demonstrates His unshakeable determination to do so. It’s all about defending the honor of His name.

For us, it signifies that when Jesus promises eternal life to His followers such as in John 10:27-30, we can know with absolute certainty that He will keep His word to us. He is, after all, one with the Father; and as such, we can count on His promises because He places the burden upon Himself to fulfill them, not us.

Because so many in the church today deny a future restoration of Israel, let’s look more in depth at what this passage and Zechariah 12-14 tell us about Israel’s future.

The Promised Restoration of Israel in Ezekiel 36:22-38 Remains Unfulfilled

How do we know this restoration of Israel lies in the future? It’s because the details of the entire passage, 36:22-38, reveal that God has not yet fulfilled this prophecy.

Verse 27 says this about the renewing of Israel that will take place in the future: “And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statues and be careful to obey my rules.” We know from John 16:7-11 that the Holy Spirit could only come in such a way after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. God could not have fulfilled Ezekiel’s prophecy before the time of Christ because it points to a time when the Lord will put His Spirit in the hearts of the Jewish people, which could only happen after Calvary.

Furthermore, since the time of Christ we have not seen all the words of this passage come to fruition. While we see glimpses that some of the blessings regarding the Land are happening now, the Lord has not yet fulfilled the details of His promises contained in Ezekiel 36:22-38.

If the words of the prophet Ezekiel matter, and they do, then we know that God has not yet given His people all the blessings that He promised them in this passage. And the text tells us that the Lord placed upon Himself the burden of fulfilling all the details of Ezekiel 36 in order to protect the integrity of His holy name.

The future restoration of Israel is primarily about the Lord’s character; Israel will receive the many blessings promised to her because the Lord is a covenant-keeping God.

Israel Will Repent at Jesus’ Return to the Earth

Zechariah 12 reveals that the fulfillment of God’s promised restoration of Israel will begin at the time of Jesus’ second coming. It’s then that the Jewish people will repent en masse and open the door to God pouring out His Spirit upon them as Ezekiel described in chapter 36:26-27.

In Zechariah 12:10-13:1, the prophet foretells a time of widespread repentance for the nation of Israel at a time when the people will recognize Jesus as their Messiah. Verse 10 says, “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.”

Zechariah goes to considerable length to identify the subjects of the prophecy as people of Jewish descent. Who else could he describe as people looking “on him whom they have pierced?” As further clarification that this great change of heart must refer solely to the descendants of Jacob, the remaining verses of chapter 12 and the first verse of chapter 13 leave no room for doubt. This future time of repentance and weeping refers to Israel; it cannot refer to the church.

The apostle John alluded to this prophecy in his description of Christ’s second coming. Revelation 1:7 says, “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him.”

God Promised a Kingdom to Israel

Zechariah tells us much more about Israel’s glorious future.

Zechariah 14:9 states, “And the Lord will be king over all the earth. On that day the Lord will be one and his name one.” The remainder of the chapter describes the battle by which Jesus takes control of the nations of the world as well as the extent of His worldwide kingdom. The Lord, through His prophet, revealed that Jesus would someday reign in Jerusalem and that the extent of His rule will reach to the ends of the earth (see also Zech. 14:16-21).

In addition, Zechariah 12-14 assures us that God’s knowledge of how the Jewish people would treat their Messiah did not prohibit Him from revealing that one day the One we now know as Jesus would rule over nations of the earth from Jerusalem.

I am not simply stating the obvious here. I say these things to emphasize the following: when the Lord promised a future kingdom for Israel in Zechariah 14:8-21, He did so in full awareness that His people would reject their Messiah, which would directly lead to His death on the cross!

One cannot possibly understate this truth: God made all his promises of a glorious restoration for Israel through Zechariah and many other prophets with the full understanding that these very same people would “pierce” their Messiah.

To assert that God could use behavior of which He knew all about when He made His promises as the basis for later reneging on them impugns His character and His holiness.

This takes us back to the words of Ezekiel 36:22, “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 the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came.” He must vindicate His holy character as a covenant-keeping God by keeping His covenants with Israel.

What Does This Mean to Me?

If God can renege on promises based on behavior He has always known about, it casts an ominous shadow over our expectations for eternal life. It implies that God is not only capable of reneging on His promises, but of doing so based on behavior He knew all about at the time he made them.

Did God know about all our sins (past, present, and future) when he pronounced us righteous at the time of our salvation (our justification)? Absolutely! We never surprise the Lord by anything we do or say as bad as it might seem to us at the time. The Lord knew about all our future sins when he pronounced us forever righteous based on Jesus sacrifice on our behalf. We cannot nullify this declaration with our behavior (Rom. 8:31-35) just as Israel cannot nullify His covenants with the nation based on their behavior (Rom. 9-11).

Do you see how this confirms our “blessed hope,” the heart of what the Gospel promises us? We know that the words of Titus 2:11-14 contain unshakeable promises because of God’s holy character.

We know that Jesus is coming for us and it’s at that moment we will experience the eternal life the Lord promises us (John 14:2-3; 1 Cor. 15:51-55; Rom. 8: 23-25). We can have absolute confidence in our Gospel hope because of the Lord’s character as a covenant-keeping God. It’s impossible for Him to renege on any promise or covenant that He makes.

Those who falsely claim that God has rejected Israel assign the many Old Testament promises regarding Israel’s future restoration to the church, which not only contradicts God’s stated intent in Ezekiel 36:22-38, but also Paul’s words in Romans 11:1-2.

Others tell us that God fulfilled all His promises to and covenants with Israel with Jesus’ first coming. Those who make this erroneous assertion retrofit passages such as Ezekiel 36 and Zechariah 12-14 with an understanding totally foreign to these texts.

Both of these false viewpoints fail to maintain the integrity of the words of Scripture and dismiss the necessity of God to vindicate His holiness by keeping His promises to Israel (Ezekiel 36:22-24).

Israel’s current existence reminds us that we serve a covenant-keeping God and signifies that He will soon send His son to take us home.

Maranatha!!!

Jonathan Brentner

Website: Our Journey Home

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E-mail: Jonathanbrentner@yahoo.com

Oct 5, 2020

Plans for a Digital Dollar Are in the Works

For years, several central banks have contemplated the introduction of a digital currency. These talks have never gone beyond the theoretical planning stage because it would be a huge move to switch to something that is outside the current banking system.

The Federal Reserve has been researching the nuts and bolts of a digital currency for some time. The Board of Governors has a technology lab that has been building and testing a range of distributed ledger platforms to understand their potential benefits and tradeoffs. Staff members from several Reserve Banks, including Cleveland Fed software developers, are contributing to this effort.

The business world has made huge advances in creating technology that makes a 100% digital currency system possible. You can now use your smartphone to conduct nearly any financial transaction. The day may soon come when children have no knowledge of paper currency.

The COVID-19 crisis has motivated the Federal Reserve to take a series of bold steps, and a digital dollar is now on the front burner. The Fed is planning to send money directly to Americans In The Next Crisis: “By getting money to consumers, you can limit the depth and duration of a recession.”

Former Fed official Simon Potter sees the Federal Reserve as being able to act faster than the government. If the economy goes to crash mode, the Fed can get money swiftly to people who need it most in a crisis.

Potter added, “It took Congress too long to get money to people, and it’s too clunky. We need a separate infrastructure. The Fed could buy the bonds quickly without going to the private market. On March 15 they could have said interest rates are now at zero, we’re activating X amount of the bonds, and we’ll be tracking the unemployment rate—if it increases above this level, we’ll buy more. The bonds will be on the asset side of the Fed’s balance sheet; the digital dollars in people’s accounts will be on the liability side.”

Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester delivered a speech to the Chicago Payment Symposium titled “Payments and the Pandemic” in which, after going through the big picture boilerplate, Mester goes straight to the matter at hand.

In the section titled “Central Bank Digital Currencies,” the Cleveland Fed president writes that “the experience with pandemic emergency payments has brought forward an idea that was already gaining increased attention at central banks around the world, that is, central bank digital currency (CBDC).”

And in the shocking punchline, then goes on to reveal that “legislation has proposed that each American have an account at the Fed in which digital dollars could be deposited as liabilities of the Federal Reserve Banks, which could be used for emergency payments.”

The US Constitution states that all spending needs to be approved by the House of Representatives. There is no provision that authorizes the Fed to issue money in any form to the public. Since much of what the Fed does is illegal, it doesn’t matter what the founding fathers had to say.

The Fed realized that sending out cash doesn’t guarantee that will spend the money to reach the goal of boosting the economy. By having a digital dollar, they can add a time limit to each account. If you don’t spend the money in a set time period, it may disappear.

The Fed’s digital dollar will fit perfectly in with the coming mark of the beast. People will line up for days to receive a chip that will give you $1,200 a month for free. I can see now why the Book of Revelation makes such strong warning against people taking the devil’s mark.

“And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, ‘If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name’” (Revelation 14:9-11, ESV).

—Todd


God’s Staying Hand

Author’s note: While looking through correspondence from my friend Ed Merrick, a well-known school principal and public educator in our region, who died at age 83 on September 4, 2020, I came across an article he found to be especially compelling, and in his always encouraging way let me know. It was posted as a terryjamesprophecyline.com blog article on July 6, 2020.

It is an article I think needs looked at again as we rapidly approach November 3, 2020. 

The past weekend this nation celebrated Independence Day 2020. The holiday is a sort unlike any celebrated by any other country in earth’s history. There will never be a holiday of its like again this side of Christ’s next intervention into the sordid and sorry affairs of man.

I can say this with certitude—at least within my own view—because America is the last hope, in human terms, for freedom to the extent America has enjoyed that blessing for 244 years. We are witnessing liberty’s last gleaming.

When thinking on this commentary, I first thought to title it “Why America Is Lost.” The thought was that the nation has since some time in the 1950s begun the dismantling of all that is good about her, as French philosopher and admirer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, would have it.

By the late 1950s, influences by Karl Marx and especially of Charles Darwin, as well as by other anti-God minions, had so invaded the educational process in America as to weaken the undergirdings that held erect America’s “goodness.”

That “goodness” is the Judeo-Christian principles upon which the founding fathers placed the republic they created. By 1963, those principles had eroded to the point that prayer and Bible reading were banished in public classrooms. The Ten Commandments became anathema to the new masters of education. There were actually statements made to the effect that the commandments should not be posted anywhere in public places—especially not within public classrooms. The rationale? Because the children might actually read them and begin to think they have to obey and practice them. That insanity is recorded for anyone who cares to research it. I’m not making it up, as they say.

I remember a thirty-something-year-old professor standing before my political science class in my freshman year at college lauding the marvels that Marxism-Leninism offered as opposed to the evil presented by American adventurism and bloody war-making since the founding. By then, the erosion of American “goodness,” thus its “greatness,” was well underway.

So, as I say, I started to give this commentary the title, “Why America Is Lost.” I thought to present the fact that the disease of anti-God inculcation has so infected America at its core that the nation cannot be spared the inevitable fall that God’s righteousness—the only goodness that exists—ultimately demands.

As de Tocqueville and any observer within the realm of rationality would rightly conclude, America has lost her goodness, her godly foundational mooring. So she has lost her greatness (the gleaming of freedom as testimony to God providing certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).

We have allowed the “wickedness in high places”—those principalities and powers in the lofty perches of academia and government—to replace the godly foundations. The nation has been and is at this moment being deconstructed by lawlessness in an avalanche of tearing down all values formerly held to as suitable for a good and moral people.

Founders like Franklin and Adams forewarned about dangers intrinsic within the populace ever abandoning the Judeo-Christian base they had erected. Any other people than a morally based, truly free people, they consistently forewarned, are unsuitable for God-given governance. Any people not firmly moored by such providentially influenced foundation are ultimately destined to lose their liberty, was the message.

That those liberties implicit and explicit within the Bill of Rights are even at this moment under assault cannot be denied. The anarchists, arsonists, and so-called deconstructionists of the radical left make liberty’s last gleaming a manifest destiny for Americans.

The Democrat party champions those who are fomenting a cultural revolution that mimics those of Mao and others. Lawlessness rules in major cities where the reprobate thinking of Democrat mayors and governors agrees with the Marxist demands that law enforcement be eliminated through defunding and other means.

The Republican Party for the most part refuses to stand up against the evil that has taken over much of the nation’s youth—the Millennial generation. From kindergarten through doctoral programs, these have been victims of a satanically influenced cabal of anti-God educators for more than six decades. The title, “Why America Is Lost,” therefore, would be appropriate for an article in this day and time.

But the impression struck as the depression deepened in thinking on these matters. “You have left out one ingredient to all this seeming madness afflicting the nation and world.”

Indeed, I had left out the most important ingredient when thinking on the insanity raging within our nation and beyond. That factor is God’s staying hand.

America, although it shows every indicator of precipitous decline from which there seems no escape, remains the freest nation on earth. Its economy, already untenable because of debt extrapolated into hundreds of trillions of dollars for future generations, remains intact, despite suffering a complete shutdown due to a largely contrived virus threat. Most of the nation’s heartland continues to function and show progress toward a return to a degree of normalcy, despite the most vicious attempts imaginable by globalist diabolists in DC and other capitals of the world to rip American sovereignty and autonomy to shreds.

It is incontrovertibly true from the perspective of Bible prophecy, within the observations of those spiritually attuned. God continues to restrain the raging efforts to bring down this supernaturally inspired experiment in liberty. America will be here, I’m believing, until that restraint is withdrawn when Christ calls all born again believers to Himself.

Meantime, it is incumbent to pray fervently that He who sits in Heaven—and obviously has the rebels of planet earth in derision as in Psalm 2—continues to restrain the satanically enraged evil with His omnipotent, staying hand.

–Terry