No 11

(Back in the land)

An atheist once said to his Christian friend : “If the Bible is as true as you claim it to be, its proof must be very simple – tell me in one word why you believe the Bible is true”. The Christian thought about that for a little while and said : “The Jew, my friend, the Jew”. The atheist had to admit that his friend was right; oh, he didn’t become a believer, but he knew about the Jews. What other country or people in the world would have survived the dispersions, the persecutions and the genocides that the Jewish people have endured over the many centuries? Yet, in 1948, a small group of Jews began to populate the land that has become to be known today as Palestine. They were poor and had no resources – just a small bunch of rabbis, some students of the Torah and a few families holding on to a promise that God made to Abraham thousands of years ago. The Bible says in Genesis 15 that God gave a piece of land to His people. He also said earlier to Abram in Genesis 12 : 3 that : “I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee and in thee all families of the earth shell be blessed ”. So these hapless souls arrived in a land that had been neglected for centuries. It was full of swamps in some areas and barren desert land in other areas; still they pushed on. Their neighbours the Arabs fiercely opposed the idea of them settling there and basically said that they would eventually drive them into the Mediterranean Sea. Well, that didn’t happen as we know and God protected their return to the land; in disbelief, mind you, but He still protected them. The miracles that occurred after their initial push to possess the land are no less grand than the ones that God operated in the Old Testament. We will look at some of these miracles in later studies and see how Elie Cohn, Golda Meier, Ariel Sharon and others were used by God to accomplish the seemingly impossible at hand – that of re-building the nation of Israel. In the Jerusalem Post, Israel’s main newspaper, is a political cartoon called “Dry Bones”. It takes its name from the prophesy-vision in chapter 37 of the book of Ezekiel.