“Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips [foreign vine slips. Revised Version]. In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish: but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow” (Isaiah 17:10-11).
There is a great deal more than meets the eye of the casual reader in this interesting and ancient prophecy. Startling things had to occur, stretched over two millenniums, before it could be fulfilled.
The Jew and his history is an insoluble and an incredible mystery apart from the governmental dealings of God. If only the infidel would honestly study the records of the Jews, he would find facts that could not be explained away, proving that the direct hand of God was passed over this nation.
Israel’s turning her back upon God was an act of peculiar heinousness. They stood in a relationship to God that none other nation did. Their sustainment in the desert for forty years was a miracle of the first magnitude. The possession of Canaan was an act of grace on the part of God. Again and again He sought to teach them the lesson that departure from God is a grievous thing. Again and again were they given into the power of their enemies. Again and again God raised up deliverers.
Israel’s ingratitude to God must surely be marked by events that would show unmistakably that they were from the hand of God. But God in patience waited till the rejection of the Lord Jesus Christ had sealed their rejection of Him with a deeper dye of guilt, followed up by their rejecting the testimony of the Holy Spirit through Stephen’s witness.
Then the blow fell. Titus, the Roman general and son of the reigning emperor, besieged Jerusalem, captured the city, the temple was raised to the ground, fulfilling the prophecy of the Lord Himself when here on earth, and the Jews were driven from their own land to be the dispersed of Israel throughout the Gentile nations. Their survival as a separate people during these nearly two thousand years of wandering and persecution is without a parallel in the history of the world, and cannot be explained on natural grounds. It is SUPERNATURAL. It is the finger of God.
But two things had to happen to begin with to prepare things for the fulfilment of Isaiah’s ancient prophecy. The land had first to be depopulated, and second to become barren and sterile. The first was brought about by the dispersion of the Jews by Titus. The second came about by the withdrawal of the latter rain by God, which withdrawal was so serious in its consequences, in the absence of the rainfall when it was acutely needed in the month of May, that the country was reduced to sterility and barrenness, and became overrun with thorns.
In this way the native vines and other fruits perished, and the land became a barren possession to the Gentile power that held it. In other words, whilst the miraculous power of God was preserving the people for the land, in this miraculous way the land was being preserved for the people.
Some fifty or sixty years ago the latter rain began gently to return, and gradually became established, so that it could be counted upon. The result was that the hopes of those, who took an interest in the agricultural and horticultural prospects of the country, began to rise, and took practical shape in the establishment of agricultural colonies. The war gave a check to this for the moment, but the Turk being flung out of the land, and the suzerainty of Great Britain inspiring confidence, the enterprise was revived, and at the present time them are more than one hundred such establishments. One of the oldest and the largest is named Rishon-le-Zion. This colony planted 400,000 fruit trees and 3,000,000 vine slips imported from Spain.
The writer possesses a wine bottle label, part of it reading as follows:
PALESTINE.
Guaranteed to be the production
of vines transplanted from
Portugal to Palestine.
Is this not a striking fulfilment of the prophecy of over 2,600 years ago? Does it not tell us that God keeps His word?
Part of the prophecy still has to have its fulfilment. It speaks of the prosperity of the country in the beginning, and of the glad hopes of the colonists, who settle in the land promised to Abraham without Abraham’s faith. Their hopes, however, will be dashed to the ground when the day of the great tribulation bursts upon them, the time of “Jacob’s trouble,” or as our verse graphically phrases it, “the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.” That time is yet future for the great tribulation is yet to come. Come it must for only in that way will the Jew be finally humbled and blessed. Israel can only come into the land of her possession through purification, repentance, and acknowledgement of their Messiah, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.