A Prophetic Perspective: Through Avner Boskey, Israel

ISRAEL AND SYRIA - BETWEEN A HARD PLACE AND A SOLID ROCK A Prophetic Perspective: Through Avner Boskey, Israel Avner's e-mail: psalm67@netvision.net.il

Christ's birthday approaches and a traumatized millennium is about to wind down. Could it be that peace on earth and good will toward men is about to explode into reality for the Jews and Muslims of the Middle East? Will Assad and Barak sign a peace treaty between Israel and Syria? Will Damascus again control the Golan Heights, and 18,000 Jewish people be transferred from there to new homes near Tel Aviv and Haifa? Do these astounding events have any prophetic significance?

BIRTHRIGHT BLUES

The people in Israel are tired. Fifty years of hostility from our Arab neighbors have taken their toll. Parents despair to think of their sons playing hide and seek with Muslim terrorists in the rocky creeks and on the hills of Lebanon. Iran and Iraq's pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons has sobered many Israelis. The future looks grim. Any solution which might bring peace seems preferable to a hot missile war. A significant percentage of the people hope that perhaps the Muslim Arabs will eventually accept our right to exist, especially if we show ourselves willing to sacrifice what is one of the most dear things to us portions of our homeland.

Most Israelis are secular in lifestyle. They are more comfortable spending their Sabbath picnicking by the Mediterranean than praying in a synagogue. The concepts of irrevocable covenants, a chosen people, and God-given borders leave many Israelis unsettled and disquieted. A recent survey of high schoolers broadcast on Israeli television found that many were shockingly unaware of the history, physical location and strategic military role of the Golan Heights. Many Israelis are caught in a materialistic fog, more concerned about MTV and peace in our time than about God's promises and calling.

The present generation can be unfavorably compared to Jacob and Esau. In many senses they are exhausted like Esau, but it is an exhaustion from war and hostility. Many Israelis are also famished for fast food like Esau, but their fast food fantasy is the materialistic Western dream of the good life prosperity and personal fulfillment. The God of Jacob seems too old-fashioned and politically incorrect these days. His admonitions to love Him with all our hearts seem kind of embarrassing when the Gentiles are looking. His call to recognize and honor His restoration of our people to our land is dismissed on CNN and the BBC as fundamentalistic. Is it any wonder that many Israelis have concluded in the privacy of their hearts, Behold, I am about to die; so of what use then is the birthright to me? . . . so Esau despised his birthright. (Gen.25:27-34)

THE WORDS OF THE PROPHETS ARE WRITTEN IN THE NEWSPAPERS

God does not only speak through prophetically gifted ministers at church conferences. He is quite willing to speak through the lens of the world, through its writers, artists, musicians and politicians when God's people are otherwise engaged and preoccupied. Listen to these bullet quotes from recent Israeli newspapermen.

As an adviser to the prime minister has put it, Barak wants the public to go to sleep for several months until there is a framework deal .. . . .Creating a public environment that focuses on the benefits of peace rather than on its price is key to Barak's strategy . . . (Jerusalem Post Fri. Nov. 5 99 by David Makovsky). The big achievement is Barak's putting everyone to sleep . . . Barak is giving them (ed., the public) the feeling that the sky is not falling . . . The dream of the Greater Land of Israel is over (Jer. Post Fri. Nov. 5 99 by Herb Keinon). The diagnosis is obvious: we just want peace so very badly, to the point where some Israelis are irrepressibly predisposed to ignoring the iniquities of the peace partner. Like all addictive illnesses, the starved for peace syndrome brings on blindness towards one's own destructive behavior. (Jer. Post Sun Nov 7 99 by David Weinberg)

A PROMISE IS FOREVER

The first question to be settled is this: Are current events the blind stumblings of a fearful human race that ultimately have no meaning? Or is there a sovereign hand of God moving history to a sacred and glorious climax? If the God of Jacob exists, then whatever happens to the Jewish people has significance. That people has received gifts and a calling from God which are irrevocable (Rom.11:28-29; 9:4-5). Messiah has come to fulfill and not destroy all that has been promised to the Jewish people in the Bible.

In Genesis 15:2-3 Abraham asked God if Abraham's own inheritance should be given to his chief administrator Eliezer, a Syrian from Damascus who was born into Abraham's household as a slave. God's response was that the gifts and calling would be given to Abraham's chosen seed through Isaac and Jacob to the Jewish people and not to a Syrian. And a few verses later the Lord even deeds most of present-day Syria up to the Euphrates River over to Israel as their eternal Promised Land (Gen.15:18) a divine promise that God will one day fulfill to the letter.

The divine calling on Israel includes being the chosen Jewish people, having the promised land of Israel and becoming a great blessing to the entire world (Gen.12:1-3). Satan has continually opposed each clause of this covenant with demonic strategies: antisemitism to physically annihilate the Jewish people (Psa.83:1-8); the anti-Zionist Palestinian/Arab movement which claims as Arab and Muslim the land of Israel which was promised to the Jewish people alone (Psa.83:12; Ezek.36:1-8); and Replacement Theology in Samaritanism, Christianity and Islam, each of these streams claiming that God has rejected the Jewish people and their irrevocable calling, and has preferred Gentiles in their place.

One point should be clearly stressed here: God has granted the entire land of Israel to the Jewish people as an irrevocable inheritance. Part of that deed includes land presently within modern Syria's borders. Ultimately God will establish those borders as Israel's final borders (Deut.32:8-9; Joel 3:1-2). As far as God is concerned, no matter how Israel's present government may exercise its political authority, it has no divine authority to trade the Jewish people's own inheritance away, especially not to the present dictator of Damascus.

A HARD RAIN'S GONNA FALL

Israel's God promised that if the Jewish people loved God and obeyed Him in their land, He would grant them the yearly rains. The land of Israel has always been dependent on yearly rainfall for its survival, not like Egypt with its broad Nile (Deut.11:10-17). Israel's national survival would be based on having a national heart of love for Israel's God, and drought would be the biblical wake-up call for the entire Jewish nation. The ministry of Elijah the prophet got Israel's attention precisely by withholding the yearly rains (I Ki.17:1; 18:1-2, 16-18). At present there is no nation on earth which is righteous and dedicated to the God of Jacob. Nevertheless God in His grace and mercy usually pours out the yearly rains on all the nations. Similarly He continues to bring about the physical restoration of the Jewish people to their promised homeland by grace even though most Israelis do not recognize Him or honor His atoning love for them. At the close of the millennium Israel is presently experiencing what is could well be its most serious drought since the days of Elijah. It is as if God is displeased that the Jewish people's leaders are trading away their Abrahamic inheritance, the mountains and heights of Israel, for a peace which, though it may seem right to some men (Prov.14:12), is not rooted in the God of Israel (consider a similar context in Isa.8:6, 10; 7:4-8).

IMITATING THE NATIONS

All Israel wants is to be like England or Sweden or America. To be left alone in peace. Prosperity, personal fulfillment and pleasure are the goals we seek. This cry is not new. It echoes down through the corridors of time. Over three thousand years ago the Jewish nation cried to Samuel the prophet, No, but there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations... (1 Sam. 8:19-20). Ezekiel heard God's adamant response 500 years later, And what comes into your mind will not come about, when you say, We will be like the nations, like the tribes of the lands, serving wood and stone . As I live , declares the Lord God, surely with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm and with wrath poured out, I shall be king over you! (Ezek.20:32-33)

God will not indefinitely allow His Jewish people to serve the gods of peace instead of the God of peace. He will not allow His people who dwells apart, and shall not be reckoned among the nations (Num.23:9) to blend in and get lost among the countries of the world. The reason? Because God has an irrevocable calling on the Jewish people. They will again be a light to all the nations (Isa.49:6: Acts 13:47), an exceedingly great army of God (Ezek.37:10), and the key to the deepest riches of the gospel and life from the dead itself (Rom.11:12, 15)! The Jewish people's calling and destiny is to hang on to the Solid Rock and to dwell close to Him. The people whom I formed for Myself, will declare My praise! (Isa.43:21) Until Israel finds real shelter in the cleft of that Solid Rock, pray for its preservation, protection and purification as it stands in a hard place.

Avner Boskey psalm67@netvision.net.il