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T H E
K I N G ’ S^ B U S I N E S S
December 1926
J r The Promised Land and the People BY REV. S. B. ROHOLD, F.R.G.S., AND REV. ARTHUR W. PAYNE Of f h e B. J. S. Mount Carmel Bible School, Evangelical and Medical Mission to" Israel, Haifa, Palestine
in ridicule in the lips of talkers as one has so often heard recently, even from the Jews as well as the Gentiles: “Call this a land flowing with milk and honey! We are ‘fed up’ with Palestine, others can have the Promised Land,” so it is an infamy to the people. For this very reason the Lord Himself is yet to Justify His Sovereign choice of the Holy Land, and whatever the oppressing ruling nations may have thought or think of it, or even fearful and doubting Israel herself, Jehovah says it is MY LAND (36:5), and He has spoken in the Are of His Jealousy concerning it, par ticularly because its desolate wastes and its cities have been forsaken and become a prey and a derision to the residue
CCf | V) Him give all the prophets witness.” To whomt To JESUS the King of the Jews, who Is Christ the JL King of Israel. It has been well said: “In Isaiah we have JESUS the King of the Jews coming as the Servant of JEHOVAH as Salvation. In Jeremiah, we have Him as the Suffering Witness; In Ezekiel, as the Mighty Ood subduing all enemies under His feet, reigning In His own land Palestine, over His own people the Jews in glorious peace as the JEHOVA-SHAMMAH.” As Dr. A. T. Pierson so often pointed out, we have in one chapter of Scripture a great subject dealt with by the Holy Spirit of Inspiration all but exhaustively,—so In Ezekiel 36,
of the nations round about. There are those who sug gest that these promises are not to be taken literally con cerning Palestine, and cer tainly not concerning such an unworthy, small, despised people as the Jews, but it is well for us who believe God and His Word to consider carefully what He says, lest we add or take away from it, to His dishonor and our shame and loss. Though we may spiritually apply them to the present age, to the Land of Promise, for as the three fold general division of the Book of Ezekiel might indi cate, Chapters 1-34 have been placed under the heading of Passover Chapters, 35-39 the Pentecostal Period, and Chap ter 40 to the end of the book. Tabernacle stage; correspond ing to “the Lord Jesus Christ our offering and Peace,”-“the Lord Jesus Christ our life through His Spirit;” and “the
we have God’s great purpose for the Jews (or the He brews) In the land of the Hebrews, the Holy Land; the people of Israel In the Land of Israel, or as the motto of the Zionist movement reads: “Artz Israel le Am Israel,” 1. e., “The land of Israel for the people of Israel.” We must bear in mind who It Is that writes under Divine guidance these precious words that are so timely and oppor tune in the very age and mo ment In which we live. It Is the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, whose name translated means "whom God (the Great One and Strong One) strength ened.” He has had his call in the first chapter, not very different from the call of Isaiah -in the sixth chapter of that book. He had visions of the Triune God Elohim, he has heard the voice of El-Shad- dai, the Almighty, and has fallen on his face before the
WHEN THE KING SHALL COME! Oh, the weary night is waning, And the clouds are rolling by, See the long expected morning Now is dawning in the sky, When from Zion’s lofty mountain We shall hear the Watchman cry, And rejoicing we shall gather, When the King shall come. When the ransomed of Jehovah. From the East and the West, Shall return with joy and gladness To receive the promised rest; Then shall every tribe and nation Out of every land be blessed, And rejoicing they shall gather When the KING shall come! O Zion! O Zion! Thou shall be exalted When the KING shall come.
Lord Jesus Christ our blessed Hope at His appearing in glory,”—yet we must remember that there is a literal prom ised land; there is a scattered, but now returning people, to whom these promises apply and to none else, as they and the nations of the world are slowly beginning to recognize. There is something even mystical about this Land of Prom ise, which has ten different terms in which it is described in this chapter alone, and it is even personally addressed by the covenant Jehovah who is the “Triune Creator” in vs. 13, 14. “Thus saith the Lord God; because they say unto you, Thou, land, devqurest up men, and hast bereaved thy nations; therefore thou shalt devour men no more, neither bereave thy nations any more, saith the Lord God.” Two things are said of It, that it “eateth up the inhabitants thereof,” and that it “spueth out the inhabitants thereof” (Numbers 13:32). When the writer was a student at college, he remembers well a rustic fellow-student giving in a college sermon as a reason why the Israelites were afraid to go into
glory of JEHOVAH as he sees a MAN on the Throne of God. It Is from this humble servant of the Lord, so frequently called by the name “son of man," that we have this message of the 36th chapter. We must remember that this book Is In every synagogue in the Holy Land and In every part of the world, in the Hebrew language, as part of the “Scroll of the Prophets.” The message, addressed primarily to the mountains of Israel, in contact to Mount Seir In the last verse of the 35th chapter, and the mountains are mentioned seven times (Including vs. 34, 12, 35, 1, 4, 6, 8), and the “ancient high places” spoken of in the second verse remind us of the reference In the song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32 to the Promised Land, where having spoken of the Most High having "divided the nations when he separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. He made them ride on the 'high places' of the earth.” So elsewhere Palestine is termed "the glorious land,” the “glory of all lands,” and yet it is to be despised, taken up
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