Israel Achieved God's Purpose (MP 56)

Fourteen hundred years before Christ was born,
God’s earth was covered with the race He made;
They were all condemned, hopeless, and forlorn,
Unless He came, His life for sins to trade!
The tribe God Chose, full-grown, dwelt in the land
He’d promised Abraham’s offspring to own,
Having been brought by God’s Almighty hand,
Though to rebellion they were ever prone!
Israel conquered Canaan, but disobeyed,
By allowing many aliens remain;
Straying, strife, and wars their lives did pervade,
History filled with troubles, stress, and strain!
God’s toil with them full justified His zeal;
The priceless prophecies prove Jesus real!

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SPECIAL NOTICE: Beginning MARCH 9, I will start a new series in God’s Master Plan for the world---PROHECIES OF THE COMING MESSIAH! With Israel settled in Canaan, God revealed 340 forecasts of the future life of JESUS OF NAZARETH, every one of which was fulfilled! You will not want to miss any of these amazing prophecies and proofs of their fulillment! WILLIAM J.B. CRITTENDEN
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Scripture Quoted (NIV) [Brackets added]
Joshua 21:43-45—“So the Lord gave Israel all the land he had sworn to give their forefathers, and they took possession of it and settled there. The Lord gave them rest on every side, just as he had sworn to their forefathers. Not one of their enemies withstood them; the Lord handed all their enemies over to them. Not one of the Lord’s promises to the house of Israel [Jacob] failed; every one was fulfilled.”

Acts 9:23—“Yet Saul [later named Paul] grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Christ [Messiah].”

Commentary on: “Israel Achieved God’s Purpose”
How God labored with Israel! For over five hundred years, beginning with Abram, He manipulated everything: To have them born of chosen parents; arranging for Jacob and all seventy family members to be isolated in Egypt for 430 years and multiplied into millions; crushing Egypt and bringing them out on a forty-year odyssey through the desert back to Canaan; and leading them to victory over all the seven tribes that already resided in the Promised Land. And He was forced to do all this in spite of the stubborn Israelites’ repeated rebellions against Him and the faulty leaders placed over them! Now that they were resting in Canaan, instead of gratefully worshiping Him and remaining faithful, they began 1400 more years of disobedience, internal squabbling, civil war, idolatry, intermarriage with aliens, etc., in punishment, for which God raised up conquerors from Assyria, Babylon, Macedonia, and Rome, during which most of them died or were carried away.

If you read the Old Testament all the way through, you cannot help but grow weary of Israel’s incorrigible behavior and their incessant calls upon God to have mercy on them; which He obligingly does over and over again, until finally even a gracious God has had enough—He dulls their spiritual insight even more, until the spiritual and civil leaders, the wise and wealthy, cannot recognize God when He comes to earth as the man, Jesus of Nazareth, bringing redemption so that they can live eternally. We can only shake our heads and ask: Why did God choose Israel anyway? After all, didn’t He know the future? Then, knowing how impossible it would be to make them love and be faithful to Him, wasn’t choosing Israel a mistake by God?

No, it was not a mistake; Israel achieved the purpose God had for it; they remain “the apple of His eye”; and they will receive grace for conversion to accept Christ and become evangelists to the world during the millenium—the thousand year reign of Christ. God is satisfied with Israel for many reasons. Two of the most important are: (1) The more than 300 prophecies in the Old Testament that describe visible events in the life of Jesus ought to convince the most skeptical cynic to believe that the man Jesus of Nazareth is in reality God of this universe; and (2) From the Israelite race came the Savior of the world. From our limited perspective we cannot know the full mind of God, and the story of Israel is not yet finished. The Bible has many prophecies of unfulfilled evens still to occur in the life of Israel.

In the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament we read how Saul, a young star Pharisee, was called by God from heaven to become His apostle to the Gentiles. Immediately Saul began baffling the Jews in Damascus by presenting the prophecies written hundreds of years before His birth proving that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah sent from God. He proved it by recalling to them events in the life of Jesus that precisely matched those written long ago by the prophets.

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not die, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

“That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’, and believe in you heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)