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Israel
Accepts Her Messiah!
Perhaps the most touching story
in the Tanakh is that of Joseph and his eleven brothers. As a young adult,
Joseph had a dream from God that prophesied of his brother's coming and bowing
down before him. Joseph's recounting of this dream to his brothers stirred their
feverous jealousy and hatred of Joseph to new heights. His brothers, to a man,
swore "we will never bow to you!"
In time, Joseph's brothers took him and threw him into a pit with the
intent of killing him. But instead, they settled on selling him as a slave to a
caravan of traders that just "happened" to be passing by on their way
to Egypt.
Just imagine what the young
teenage Joseph must have felt. After narrowly escaping death, he receives but a
bitter consolation from the alternate plan of being sold as a slave to total
strangers, never to see Jacob his father, nor the rest of his family again. Yet
incredibly, as time will reveal, he still loves his brothers. Years later his
brothers came to Egypt during the famine in search of food and bowed down at the
feet of the lord of the land Joseph. (Joseph had been promoted to prime minister
over Egyptian affairs.) Little did they realize that the object of their
prostration was the boy with whom they had so treacherously dealt. As they
lingered at his feet, Joseph quickly devised an ingenious two-fold plan that
would bring his beloved younger brother Benjamin to Egypt, while simultaneously
testing his brothers to see if perhaps they had repented of their mistreatment
of him.
After they finally returned to
Egypt with Benjamin, Joseph held a banquet for his brothers. Benjamin, Joseph's
only maternal brother, was given five times more than his brothers at the
banquet; yet, they all rejoiced with Benjamin (Gen. 43:44). This was in stark
contrast to the bitter jealousy they had manifested when Jacob had given Joseph
the coat of many colors (Gen. 37:3,23). Finally, when Joseph was going to keep
Benjamin as a slave and send the others back to Jacob in Canaan, Judah, the very
one who decided to sell Joseph into slavery (Gen. 37:26-27), came forward and
made an impassioned plea to Joseph to take him as a slave in lieu of Benjamin,
lest Jacob their father "die" (Gen. 44:18-34). This same Judah who
turned a deaf ear to Joseph's pleas for mercy not to be sold to the slave
traders years before, now pledged his very life to free Benjamin, Jacob's new
favorite, from the throes of Egyptian slavery! Judah had become a different man
and Joseph could restrain himself no longer. He burst into tears and loud
wailing and proclaimed, "I am Joseph" to the fear and dismay of his
brothers. In a phenomenal display of God's providence, the progenitors of the
Jewish race, through whom the Savior was to come, were reunited in tearful
embraces.
Jesus and His Brothers
The parallel with Jesus and his
Jewish brothers is striking. Because of Jesus' special relationship with His
heavenly Father, His brethren hated Him and pined away in bitter jealousy. They
were looking for a king seated upon a gleaming white horse, brilliantly arrayed
with armor and sword, and bent on conquest. Instead, Jesus came to them on a
donkey, announcing that their exaltation was contingent upon their acceptance of
Him as their sin-bearing Messiah.
This was the last thing they
wanted to hear. So they, like Joseph's brothers, swore they would never bow down
before Jesus. They plotted His death and eventually sold Him out for a mere
thirty pieces of silver (Matt. 26:15). Yet, in spite of it all, Jesus' heart
still yearned for His brothers. On the eve of His crucifixion Jesus, while
weeping, prophesied:
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one
who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted
to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,
but you were not willing! See! Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to
you, you shall see Me no more till you say, “Blessed is He who comes in the
name of the LORD!” (Matt. 23:37-39).
To be brought to the point of
repentance, Israel must be put through her time of testing, "Even the time
of Jacob's trouble" (Jer. 30:7). Notice that Israel is "saved out
of" the "time of Jacob's trouble." They are permanently delivered
from their oppressors (Jer.30:8), to serve "the Lord their God and David
[the Messiah son of David] their king whom I will raise up unto them"
(Jer.30:9).
Jesus called the time of
"Jacob's trouble" the "great tribulation." This tribulation
will be so frightful in terms of human destruction that it will not have any
historical precedent (Matt. 24:21-22). This means that the time of Jacob's
trouble is likely to see more than six million Jews exterminated:
And it shall come to pass, that
in all the land, saith the Lord, two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but
the third shall be left therein. And I will bring the third part through the
fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is
tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them...(Zech. 13:8-9).
This third constitutes the
"all Israel" Paul said would be saved once the "fullness of the
Gentiles come in" (Rom 11:25). The sheer horror of this time will bring
them to say, "Has not this trouble come on us because of what we did to
Jesus?" (cf. Gen. 42:21).
Presently, however, Jesus is a
by-word, incurring scorn and even blasphemy from His own brethren. But one day
they will be united to Him with weeping and mourning:
And I will pour upon the house of
David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of
supplications: and they shall look unto
me1 whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for
his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness
for his first-born (Zech. 12:10).
At that time, they will confess
those words that Jesus has patiently waited millennia to hear "Blessed is
He who comes in the name of the Lord." Israel's deliverance will be so
great that it shall erase even the mere mention of Israel's deliverance out of
Egypt:
Therefore, behold, the days come,
saith the Lord, that it shall no more be said, The Lord liveth, that brought up
the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; but, the Lord liveth, that
brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from the lands
whither he had driven them: and I will bring them back into their land that I
gave unto their fathers (Jer. 16:14-15).
Such a deliverance has yet to
occur, but will certainly take place when Israel repents and accepts Jesus as
their suffering Messiah.