7.19. Chapter 5 - Israel's Sufferings in Fulfillment of Divine Forecasts and an Object-Lesson...

Chapter 5 Israel’s Sufferings in Fulfilment of Divine Forecasts and an Object-Lesson to Christendom

THERE are yet two points in connection with Israel’s night of weeping which I must emphasise at the risk of repetition before proceeding to the second section of our psalm.

1. Israel’s sorrows and sufferings are not only due in the first instance to God’s righteous and retributive anger against His people; but are in fulfilment of prophetic forecasts, predictions and warnings, some of which were uttered at the very beginning of their national history.

If it be true indeed, as their own prophets and historians pathetically complain, “that under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon Jerusalem” (Dan_9:12); and that “the misfortunes of all men from the beginning of the world, if they be compared with those of the Jews, are not so considerable ad they were,” what is this but a fulfilment of the solemn and awful words of God through Moses: “If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are within this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful Name, Jehovah, thy God, then Jehovah will make thy plagues wonderful, and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues, and of long continuance, and sore sicknesses and of long continuance.” And again in the same prophecy: “Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God with joyfulness, and with gladness of heart, by reason of the abundance of all things: therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and He shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until He have destroyed thee” (Deu_28:47-48, Deu_28:58-59).

2. The history and experience of Israel in dispersion is intended of God to be an object-lesson and warning to Christendom. This is one reason why the Shepherd of Israel—who has had His eye on his erring flock even during the period of their banishment from His presence—has so ordered their wanderings that the great bulk of the Jewish nation has for so many centuries been found in countries in which, nominally at least, the Name of Christ has been professed.

We are thankful for the confirmation of Scripture and for the light thrown on the Word of God by recent historical and monumental discoveries; but the most eloquent monument to the faithfulness of God and to the everlasting truth of His holy Word is the Jew: and there is an inscription more striking and legible than many which can be found written on papyrus or graven on rock—an inscription two millennia long, consisting of the history of the Jewish nation since their dispersion, written for the most part in their own blood. And how does the inscription read? Or in other words, what is the testimony which Israel in dispersion, and during his night of weeping, bears to the Christian nations? Some of Israel’s modern leaders and teachers would have us believe that the dispersion, instead of being an act of God’s judgment upon the nation on account of their sin, and an expression of His displeasure, was intended to be, and had indeed proved, a means of blessing to the world, because the nations have in this manner learned to know the One true and living God. Thus even in the prayer-book of the Jewish “Reform” community in Berlin we find this remarkable passage: “Exalted high was the Light of Thy knowledge (O God) in Jerusalem, and in the midst of Israel; but a dark and all-pervading night rested beyond his boundaries, and no ray of Thy light reached the peoples round about. But behold! the mighty and exalted Temple building falls—the pillars which bare its domes brake in pieces—Thine hand, O God, has broken it into fragments. Lamenting, the sons of Israel go forth into the distant land; by the waters of Babylon they sat and wept, but when they returned to the place of Thy Temple in order to build it up anew, then Thy right hand laid hold of them again, and scattered them on the face of the whole globe—even as far as the sun sends forth his rays. And behold, love sprang up where hatred was sown, and light where night had rested; the Sun of righteousness rises over the earth.”¹ And so, in a prayer for the Sabbath Day we read: “Thou hast called us as priests of Thy law, O Father of Mankind! . . . . that we might bear witness in our endeavours and strivings.”

¹ Gebetbuch der Jüdischen Reformgemeinde zu Berlin, pp. 38-39. the edition from which I am translating is the Neue Ausgabe, Berlin, 1885, Selbstverlag der Jüdischen Reformgemeinde. In the same spirit many, especially of the “Reformed” Rabbis, and Jewish writers, speak boastfull of Israel’s “mission” among the nations, and of the time when through them the Messianic era (for these Jews have given up the hope of a personal Messiah) shall be ushered in on the earth. But this is mere delusion; for, as I have said elsewhere, “Neither from the ‘Orthodox’ Talmudic Jews, who may be regarded as the successors of the Pharisees, nor yet from the progressive or ‘Reform’ Rabbis, who are no improvement on the Sadducees of the time of our Lord, did the Gentiles learn to know of the true and living God, but from the Jewish apostles of Jesus Christ, the true Light of the World, whose glory these Rabbis have done their utmost to hide and misrepresent before their people, and from such Jews whose names the nation cast out as evil, and who had to take upon them the same reproach of their Messiah, and follow Him ‘outside the camp.’ ” It is a notorious fact also that these Rabbis and Jewish leaders who boast in having a “mission” to the nations are doing absolutely nothing to bring the knowledge of God, or to spread abroad their law, among the Gentiles; and that since the rejection of Christ and the destruction of Jerusalem, while the Gospel of Christ has continued its triumphal march among the nations, the synagogue has been struck with impotence and unbelieving Israel with barrenness. The day is assuredly coming when the people whose calling it is to be “a kingdom of priests and an holy nation” (Exo_19:6) shall show forth God’s praise, and be the instrument in His hand to spread abroad the knowledge of God among all nations; but the law to which they will then “bear witness” (to use the language of the Reformed Prayer-Book quoted above) will be the new law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus, and the spirit in which all Israel will then go forth among the nations will be the spirit of the Apostle Paul, who said: “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world.”

Till then, as already shown, Israel is a witness chiefly to God’s righteous judgment, and the solemn inscription which is written over the history of the Jewish people since their dispersion for the instruction and the warning of Christendom is this: Jehovah is a righteous and faithful God—faithful in carrying out His threatenings as in fulfilling His promises; it is an awful thing to fall into the hands of the living God when once these hands are stretched out in judgment—whether it be against a nation or an individual. “Behold, therefore, the goodness and the severity of God; on them which fell severity; but toward thee goodness, if thou continue in His goodness; otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.” Would to God Christendom had read this inscription and had laid to heart this warning! Then it would not have developed into what it is; then it would not have fallen into the very sins and errors—in an even more intensified form—which brought about the banishment and long-continued sorrows which came upon Israel.

“Nor let the Church Christian”—says Bishop Horne, speaking of the desolation of the vineyard, (Psa_80:13)—“imagine that these things relate only to her elder sister. Greater mercies and more excellent gifts should excite in her greater thankfulness, and call forth more excellent virtues; otherwise they will serve only to enhance her account and multiply her sorrows. If she sin and fall after the same example of unbelief, she must not think to be distinguished in her punishment, unless by the severity of it. She may expect to see the favour of Heaven withdrawn, and the secular arm, instead of supporting, employed to crush her; her discipline may be annihilated, her unity broken, her doctrines perverted, her worship deformed, her practice corrupted, her possessions alienated, and her revenues seized, till at length the word be given from above, and some Antichristian power be unchained to execute upon her the full vengeance due to her sins.” But not only to God’s righteous judgment does Israel in dispersion bear witness. How thankful, for instance, even true Christians should be that in these days of increasing unbelief in the supernatural, when attempts are being made even within the professing Christian Church itself to reduce all the early records of biblical history into myths and legends, that we have still a whole nation in our midst who embody all their past history in their present, and who, by their very existence and solemn rites and observances, bear witness in a thousand ways to the historic truth of those early Scriptures which, in the providence of God, they have preserved for us.¹ And in these days also, when even theological professors coolly assert that it is doubtful whether Abraham was an actual personality, and when a canon of the Church of Egland can coolly assert that to him the actual existence of personality of Moses is “unproved ad improbable,” and when others who condescend to admit the existence of Moses as an historical personality confidently declare that he had very little or nothing to do with the giving of the Law—how thankful, I say, we should be that to this day there is a whole people scattered throughout the earth who whenever they name Abraham always add Abinu—“Abraham, our father”; and whenever they speak of Moses say, Moshe-Rabenu—“Moses, our teacher, or Law-giver,” as if in solemn protest against those extreme, unreasonable, and unjustifiable theories which are now being palmed off in the name of criticism!

¹ This section to the end of this chapter is transferred here from the author’s small book A Divine Forecast of Jewish History. And in this materialistic age, when men are denying God, not only as Redeemer but as the Creator, it is something to have a nation who throughout their history have kept the seventh day as a reminder and testimony that in six days the Lord created the heavens and the earth, but rested on the seventh day.

How significant also are the various festivals which Israel continues to observe! For instance, there is the Passover, which celebrates the great historical event of the Exodus and the wonders which God wrought for them in bringing them out of Egypt; there are the Feasts of Weeks and of Tabernacles, which commemorate the experiences in the wilderness, and their entrance into the promised land; and the many other rites and observances which could only have originated in actual facts of history, of which they are momentos.

“And as they observe the festivals so they observe the law of Moses; and it is owing to that law of Moses that they are still in existence, for Israel is not like any of the other nations. Other nations, when they have reached, as it were, their highest point, and when they have been living in great civilisation and luxury, become effete, on account of their immorality and on account of their wickedness; but Israel has never become effete.

“The sanctities of family life endure in Israel up to this day, owing to the law of Moses, owing to the ten commandments, owing to the ordinances which God gave to His people, and to God Himself watching over them. They are physically, as they ever were, distinguished by their longevity, distinguished by their tenacity and vigour of purpose, distinguished by their mental freshness so that they are able to enter into any branch of study or into any occupation of life.”^{1 1} Adolph Saphir.

“God’s judgment of Israel,” says another Hebrew Christian brother, “is the most terrible thing in history—yet they have been preserved to this very day through the power of that very God who punished them so terribly. Here they are, a monument of the truth of God’s Word—a monument also of God’s faithfulness. None of the persecutions which they have endured have availed to destroy them, neither have they broke their energy, nor subdued their indomitable will, nor crushed their power of mind; and no sooner was the great pressure which the nations—so called Christian nations—put upon them removed than we see them prosper in every country, and take leading positions in every sphere of life—in commerce and politics as well as in literature and art, showing that the Lord God has made them to be a peculiar people, a nation to be perpetuated and that it was He who gave them nerve to endure, in order that in the future, when His grace shall melt their hearts, they may be a mighty instrument to show forth His praise. There is still visible among scattered Israel something of blessing and influence, the effect of God’s training through so many centuries. Their history since the rejection of Christ is unspeakably sad; yet we cannot help noticing that in the midst of Christless Israel some traces of the grandeur and beauty of their fathers’ house still linger.

“Behold their zeal for God, their zeal for the Scriptures, their zeal for the Sabbath Day; behold the sacrifices which they make in order to carry out the injunctions of the Law! Yes, there are many features in the Jewish character which we cannot explain in any other way than this—that there is still a blessing resting on them; that the voice of God which was heard upon Sinai has still its echo in their hearts and consciences; and that the prayers which have been offered up on their behalf, by patriarchs, kings, prophets, and saints, are still held in the remembrance before the throne of God.”^{1 1} From an address by C. A. Schönberger.