223
July, 1933
T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
C 0 reseni-CDay
of PROPHECY . . . B y L ouis S. B a u m a n
OA l^S SY ) Hitlerism: Is it a Presage of “ The Time of Jacob’s Trouble” ? r e d e r ic k the Great once asked a clergyman for one infallible proof o f the inspiration o f the Scriptures.
mercilessly slaughtered more than one hundred thousand men, women, and children, and carried half as many away into slavery, after having desecrated all that they held to be holy, even sacrificing swine upon the altar of the temple and sprinkling the floor with the water in which swine’s flesh had been boiled. Then, when at last God in mercy
“ The Jews, your Majesty!” was the prompt reply. Verily, a man must be appallingly ignorant either o f the great prophecies o f Holy Writ or o f the history o f Israel, or both, if he is unconvinced that the God who sees the end from the beginning moved the pen that wrote, for instance, Leviticus 26, or Deuteronomy 28. Upon the ground o f simple obedience to the com mandments of their God, the children o f Israel were to be set “ on high above all nations o f the earth,” His own chosen people, protected, peaceful, prosperous, prolific, and powerful, with His tabernacle forever in their midst. On the other hand, if rebel lious, the curse o f God would rest upon them, and their plagues would be of “ long continuance.” Even thus it was written: “ The Lord shall make the rain o f thy land powder and dust.” “ I will make your cities wastes and bring your sanctuaries unto deso lation.” Thou “ shalt be removed into all the kingdoms o f the earth. . . . They that hate you shall reign over you . . . Thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy face, and shall not be restored to thee. . . . Thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all the nations . . . The Lord shall bring against thee a nation from far, from the end o f the earth. . . . And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and fenced walls come down... And thou shalt eat the fruit o f thine
THE JEWS What nation will you find, whose annals prove So rich an interest in Almighty love? Where will you find! a race like theirs, endow’d With all that man e’er wished, or heaven bestow’d ? They, and they only, amongst all man kind, Received the transcript o f the eternal mind; Were trusted with His own engraven laws, And constituted guardians of His cause; Theirs were the prophets, theirs the priestly call, And theirs by birth the Saviour o f us all. But grace abused brings forth the foul est deeds, A s richest soil the most luxuriant weeds. Cured o f the golden calves, their fathers’ sin, They set up self, that idol god within; View’d a Deliverer with disdain and hate, Who left them still a tributary state Seised fast His hand, held out to set them free From a worse yoke, and nail’d it to the tree: There was the consummation and the crown, The flower o f Israel’s infamy full blown; Thence date their sad declension, and their fall, Their woes not yet repeal’d, thence date them all. —W illiam C owpee .
sent unto Judah her King, they cried: “ We will not have this man to reign over us.” And when Pilate mockingly said: “ Behold your K ing!” they responded with one voice: “ W e have no king but Caesar.” And again, when Pilate would wash his hands o f His blood, they cried: “ His blood be on us, and on our children.” It has been! “ On us” ? In less than twenty years (A .D . 50), 30,000 o f them ( “ us” ) were slain in a tumult with the Romans in Jerusalem. Less than forty years later, again the Romans came, and 1,000,000 o f them ( “ us ” ) perished in the siege, while 97,000 were carried away into captivity. “ On our children” ? When Titus broke through the walls, he found the insane populace in a state o f cannibalism, actually frying the flesh o f their ("our” ) children in their fry ing pans! In A .D . 135, Hadrian com pleted the destruction of Jerusalem begun by Titus- sixty-five years be fore, slew 580,000 o f their ("our'’ ) children, ran a plowshare through Zion, fulfilling to the letter Micah’s great prophecy (3 :8 -12 ). Space here does not permit us to continue to fol low the stream o f Jewish blood that ran through the nations o f Europe during the eighteen centuries that followed. It is a ghastly tale! Ages-Old Hatred Reappears And now once again the ages-old
own body, the flesh o f thy sons and of thy daughters, which the Lord thy God hath given thee, in the siege, . . . And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole o f thy foot have rest: but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing o f eyes, and sor row o f mind: And thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance o f thy life : In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning!” With marvelous exactness, these prophecies have seen fulfillment in a hundred foreign lands. Remember Baby lon, where they hanged their harps upon the willows and sat down by the rivers and wept as they remembered Zion (Psa. 137:1, 2 ). Remember Persia and Media, where they were saved alive only by the courage of Queen Esther. Recall how, even in their own land, Antiochus Epiphanes
hatred reappears in what was supposed, but a few short years ago, to be the world’s most cultured and intellectual nation— Germany! And the mystery o f it all is— why? Ludwig Lewisohn, in his remarkable book, Israel (1925), recalls how one autumn he was walking beside the famous Jewish scientist, Jakob Wassermann, in the Styrian Alps. Suddenly, Wassermann broke a silence to say: “ When I consider the hatred and stupidity vented upon us in every age, wreaked upon us again in this age and land, I am the more convinced o f our import, o f our mis sion. Yes, we are a very famous people . . . The whole world talks about us, thinks about us. Why?” “ Then,” says Lewisohn, “ the landscape darkened ; be hind us the wall o f the mountain reflecting the last rays of the sun was one expanse of unimaginably rosy fire. We stood silent. Then we turned, and Wassermann glanced at the bright windows o f his house that stands by the lake
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