Modern Day Miracles

“When you become the father of children and children’s children and have remained long in the land, and act corruptly, and make an idol in the form of anything, and do that which is evil in the sight of the Lord your God so as to provoke Him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that you shall surely perish quickly from the land which you are going over the Jordan to possess.  You shall not live long on it, but shall be utterly destroyed.  And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you shall be left few in number among the nations, where the Lord shall drive you.”

Titus and the Roman army destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in 70 AD.  The Jews were once again a Diaspora.

Eighteen hundred years later, the Lovers of Zion began the creation of twenty new Jewish settlements in Palestine.  The Zionist movement had begun.  Its aim was the re-establishment of the nation of Israel.

The United Kingdom was the first major political power to endorse the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.  That endorsement was made public in 1917, during the First World War, in a document called the Balfour Declaration. The British government confirmed its commitment to the Jews by accepting the British Mandate for Palestine from the League of Nations in 1922.  British rule in Palestine began the following year.

Several centuries earlier, Crusaders captured Jerusalem which had been under Muslim control since 638 AD.  During the Crusades, many Jews fled to Poland.  They suffered seven centuries of persecution.  There were pogroms, a Jew’s tax, and laws that prevented them from owning land and acquiring trades.  They were forced to live in walled ghettos isolated from the rest of society.  Of the 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis during the Second World War, 3.5 million were Polish Jews.  Many countries closed their borders to Jewish refugees after the war.  The need for a Jewish homeland had reached its culmination.

On the 14^th day of May, 1948, sanctioned by a resolution adopted by the United Nations, the state of Israel was reborn.

During the next nineteen years, Jordan occupied eastern Jerusalem and its holy places.  On the 10^th of June, 1967, after the Six Day War, Israel liberated Jerusalem from Jordanian control.  In 1980, Israel proclaimed Jerusalem its eternal, undivided capital.

“In a favorable time I have answered you, and in a day of salvation I have helped you; and I will keep you and give you for a covenant of the people, to restore the land, to make them inherit the desolate heritages.  And I will make all my mountains a road, and my highways will be raised up.  Behold, these shall come from afar; and lo, these will come from the north and from the west, and these from the land of Syene.”