K-533 Israel and the Apocalypse (2 of 3) — Art Katz

The Apocalyptic Conclusion of Human History

The one word that encompasses all that we're moving into is the word apocalyptic. This is the apocalyptic conclusion of the age of history, of human history. And it's one of the reasons why the church itself has shrunk from a last days thing.

Divine Intervention Versus Human Amelioration

Remember we talked about amelioration yesterday? Instead of this sudden intrusion of God himself to come into history and time to bring judgment, and defend Israel and save her out of her final extremity in his own coming, even Christians are offended by that supernaturalism.

They would much rather see things worked out politically and that somehow man himself will resolve these differences and some kind of a peace would be established. There's something offensive, I can't understand it, but I know it's true, that there's something even in Christians that is offended by the supernaturalness of God and his own direct intervention in his own coming.

That's part of the word apocalyptic. And the church has shrunk from apocalyptic consideration because it comes with fire, comes with judgment, comes with devastation. What has happened is that the apocalyptic content of the faith has subsided since the advent of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, that with the coming in of modern times and the hope of amelioration and improvement through mankind, remember that when the 20th century began in 1900, the sense that prevailed in the world at that time was that we were at the brink of coming into a messianic age, that there would be an end of poverty, an end of disease, that there would be a reconciling of world differences, that there would be world peace and brotherhood.

World War and the Collapse of Modern Optimism

It was an age of optimism and of affluence, of prosperity, the locomotive, steam, industry, technology. Mankind was at the threshold of a golden age. Within 14 years, the world was plunged into the first of two great cataclysmic events for which we have not yet recovered.

Everything that we're suffering now has come out of this one great world war that has had two expressions, chapters one, chapter two, and we'll yet have a third. So God, you know, waits for man to rise up in his own cock-sureness and self-assurance of what he's going to perform out of his own humanity, and just when they're about to celebrate something, then the rug is pulled out, and the things that are intrinsically in defect of a world that seeks to live independent of God, then has its consequence.

And what has been lost in bloodshed, in the untold millions of lives, in violence itself, in genocide, and all of the things that have been issued from those wars, have so permanently savaged the world, it can never again be restored.

The Loss of Innocence and Natural Affection

I'm grateful to be as old as I am to remember, by comparison, before World War II, a virtual age of innocence, where if a girl was not a virgin, it was a scandal. And just, I mean, things that if you spoke them today, you would just have to smile.

They're just gone, like blushing. It's a phenomenon that does not exist anymore, and cannot exist anymore. And that's why we've raised up a whole generation of kids that have seen 100 ,000 murders and rapes by the age of 12.

And violence is just ketchup, and they're inured against compassion, and that's why in the last days, when perilous times shall come, men will be without natural affection, incapable of pity, incapable of compassion, until the only answer is an end, by judgment, to what has lost any last prospect of redemption.

This is the apocalyptic picture of the last days, but it's one that the church itself does not want to contemplate. It's secretly in its secret heart, can't things be made better? It's something like Abraham crying out, can't Ishmael live?

Israel’s Future Judgment and Restoration

So Israel, seeing its own destiny, is not absolved from the judgments of God. And I believe that they're yet future. So verse 9, surely the coastlands will wait for me, and the ships of Tarshish will come first to bring your sons from afar, their silver and their gold with them, for the name of the Lord your God, and for the Holy One of Israel, because He has glorified you.

And foreigners will build up your walls, how come they need to be built up? Still in 60, verse 10, Isaiah 60, foreigners will build up your walls, and their kings will minister to you, for in my wrath I struck you, and in my favor I have had compassion on you.

I believe that though the wrath of God has struck Israel repeatedly historically, the greatest, most recent expression of which is the Holocaust, it is not the last expression of its wrath. That there's yet a final, and that it will eclipse the previous, but what follows is compassion and God wiping away every tear.

You'll see that when you get into the prophetic scriptures, many references to the millennial advent for Israel, in which the Lord says, and you will no longer be afraid, and fear will be far from you, and there will not be terror by night.

Why are all these references made? Because right up to the very conclusion, before their entry into their millennial destiny, violence, terror, and fear is exactly what characterizes Israel experience to the end.

Jerusalem as the Center of the Theocratic Kingdom

Your gates will be opened continually, they will not be closed day or night, so that men may bring to you the wealth of the nations, with their kings led in procession. For the nation and kingdom which will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly ruined.

The glory of Lebanon will come to you, the juniper, the boxwood, the cypress, together to beautify the place of my sanctuary, and I shall make the place of my feet glorious. So here's another reference to the fact that a restored Israel, and the Jerusalem, the city of peace, is the locus of God's theocratic kingdom, and the place of his own residence.

And the sons of those who afflicted you, verse 14, will come bowing to you. Can you picture that? You can see how this scenario is being prepared. There's such a built-up reservoir of hatred and desire for retaliation and vengeance on a part of Arab nations that surround Israel that cannot be placated.

There's something about the Arab character that is predicated upon vengeance, and they're not going to take their insults lightly. And there'll be a day of reckoning, because Israel does have an obligation to the stranger in its land, which it has not acknowledged.

But the sons of those who afflicted you will come bowing to you. It's interesting why not those themselves who afflicted you, but their sons. Maybe a statement of how long the process is, from the time of affliction to the time of restoration, I can't say.

Or maybe those who afflicted will themselves be destroyed in the very process, because they'll show you that not one nation that is used by God as a rod of judgment against Israel is going to be absolved of the judgment that will come upon itself for being so used, and making themselves so willingly the instrument of God's use, and going far beyond God's own intention in bringing upon Israel the chastisement that he intends.

Because they have taken a relish, because they've made his people to howl, because they have said, lay down and we will walk over you, and the humiliation and what they have done in the land, some of those nations will be blotted out thereafter from history entirely.

They will simply no longer exist. So you say, well, Lord, how do you know that these things are future? Can it be that it's past, and these are past tribulations that Israel has experienced? Because Jordan still exists.

Edom and Moab still exist in their present-day configurations, which indicates that they have not yet been used to bring the final chastisement that ends in their own being judged. So this is the kind of student of scriptures we need to be.

Reading Prophecy Against Easy Optimism

And I had, as I shared with someone here yesterday, I had a two-hour conversation with, I think I can mention by name, John van der Hoeven, the leading prophetic voice of the Christian embassy people, who take a view very opposite of my own, that they only want to make nice and only want Israel to receive nachas and blessing and satisfaction, haven't they suffered enough, and just shriek with their fingers and ears from any point of view of the kind that I'm now bringing.

But I sought him out on my last visit, and we had, I've known him for 20 years. We used to be called peas out of the same pot, we were the Jewish and Gentile equivalent of each other, the leading prophetic voice for that movement.

And I said, no, I believe devastation is coming, and Jerusalem is yet to be rebuilt on its own heaps. Oh, he said, well, it's happening now, can't you see? Look out the window. Indeed, there was some construction going on.

I said, but dear man, it says in Jeremiah 30, which is the statement on the time of Jacob's trouble, it will be built on their own heaps unto the Lord. I said, this building is not unto the Lord. There's no consciousness of God.

And that we'll see as we examine the prophetic text, that what distinguishes these severe dealings and this restoration is that Israel knows that I am Israel, Lord. And they acknowledge God, which acknowledgement has not until this moment come and will not come until they graphically see God supernaturally revive and restore them out of their uttermost devastation.

When they are utterly bereft of hope, utterly bereft of any ability in themselves to restore themselves from the place of total devastation that God will allow, then he himself comes as their deliverer and their restorer, and then they acknowledge him as their God.

That has not yet happened, and unhappily, that's what it requires for this nation to recognize God. That's what it required for me, maybe for most of us, until we're absolutely devastated and emptied of any ability in ourselves to establish ourselves or to succeed in ourselves in the lofty intentions that we take for ourselves, that there's a God who finally reveals himself as alone, the one who can save us out of the terrible predicament we have made through our own vanity and sin and godless living and restore us out of his pure mercy, that we might know him.

The Church’s Resistance to Redemptive Judgment

So who should be more pulling for this and more recognizing the genius of it and the mystery of it and the necessity of it than the church itself that has been saved by that grace and by that mercy? And yet the remarkable thing is the church shrinks from and will not consider and talks about deserving, they don't deserve it, which indicates that the church itself is not in the place of full redemption that it needs itself to have come.

So they will call you the city of the Lord, the end of verse 14, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel, whereas you have been forsaken and hated, and I believe right up to that time, right to the end, with no one passing through, note the word forsaken, that means that those nations that have been allied to Israel will not be so in the day of Israel's extremity.

And we already see that happening, a coolness now between the United States and Israel. The Soviet Union is no longer the threatening factor that made the United States very partial to Israel, and Israel's acting increasingly and every day in ways that aggravate or offend American sensibility, and so when the time comes, by virtue of Israel's own conduct and the things that are set in motion by God, she will be forsaken.

And must be, because help can only come to her from one source, namely God. With no one passing through, I will make you an everlasting pride, a joy from generation to generation. Here I'm picking out some of the classic elements to be found in all of the prophetic scriptures that pertain to Israel's restoration, and not the least of which is the word everlasting.

Their sorrow, their distress, is their final night of terror and devastation, but the joy that comes endures forever. Then they are forever safe within their boundaries, then they'll no longer again ever be a putting out from within their boundaries.

Everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. Sorrow and mourning shall flee away, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. So it's a final extremity in history and in time, but it eventuates in an unbroken and everlasting joy.

The Antichrist, Jacob’s Trouble, and the Last Days

That's why I said before, unless we see this in the context of what is everlasting, unless we see the last day's events in the context of the eternal, we'll not only miss God, we'll be offended by Him and find ourselves opposed to Him.

We need to see the everlasting and the eternal thing that is ushered in by these final spasms, contractions, and pains of birth. It's the last day's events tied in with the time of Antichrist, the revealing of the Antichrist in the temple, demanding the worship of Israel, not receiving it, and the release of persecution.

It's the woman being pursued in the wilderness where God has prepared a place for her for three and a half years, where the dragon cannot devour the man-child but seeks then to persecute the woman, but God has prepared a place for her in the wilderness.

All of these events are final last day's events that consummate with the Lord's own coming in the final extremity in Jerusalem when all nations come up against it to destroy it and reveals himself as Israel's deliverer, while at the same time, as I hope to show you, it's not only the Israel within the political Israel of today who are suffering these extremities, but Israel everywhere in the earth.

It's the time of Jacob's trouble, wherever Jacob is to be found, and that includes New York and Toronto and Chicago and Minneapolis and St. Paul and the Phoenix and all of these places. Jews are going to be harassed and persecuted and in flight for their lives.

It's a final sifting, and I'll show you this, where I will sift you among the nations. I will sift you through the nations, and not so much as one kernel shall fall to the ground. So there are catastrophic things happening in the land, and there's also catastrophic things happening in the nations.

The Sifting of Israel and the Testing of the Church

That means that no one is exempt. Nations are observing the entire phenomenon, and the church and the nations are in the strategic place to take the woman into the wilderness for three and a half years, that she would not be devoured by the dragon, and to extend mercy that they might obtain mercy.

So while Israel is being sifted, the church itself is being sifted by the challenge that comes to it to be to this people in its crisis moment, the very mercy of God. As Ezekiel 20 says, I will meet with you in the wilderness of the nations face to face.

We're going to get into that, which to me clearly means a revelation of God to the Jews through those who will be extending mercy to it who are Gentiles. For me, if you read Ben Israel, one of the most breaking things that happened to me was the revelation of God through a Gentile girl.

One I would have spit out and not even given a second look, a wasp, middle class, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but there was something in her face and in her spirit, her guilelessness and sweetness and willingness to risk the brute that I was and walk with me and tell me it's the love of God.

I was probing her relentlessly, this hard-nosed atheist, and how do you know there's a God? She just blurts out, I know that God lives, he lives in me, and boom, I went down like a struck ox, because I saw something in that moment.

It was not a cliche, there was a face, and that face, particularly a Gentile face, that reveals God, the God of Israel to a Jew, is the most powerful testimony of all, because they are exhibiting the light that lightens the Gentiles, which is the glory of the people Israel.

And that's God, see what was key to my salvation was already a projection of the massive mode that God is going to use through the nations, which is also the test and the revelation of the church. When I preach this I say, will the true church please stand up?

How do I know if I'll be at art? Because you'll be of a kind that will be willing not only to extend mercy, but to bear the indignation and the impatience of this people who are going to be totally bent out of shape, and will not be grateful necessarily that you're extending themselves, and you'll be able to bear it with magnanimity and not be disturbed, and in that show them the face of the Lord.

Mourning Before Everlasting Joy

What is more calculated to bring a mourning to Israel and a sighing of a kind that eclipses any previous sorrow, than the likely loss of their own nationhood, and their own security, and the fulfillment of what they thought was their last hope.

It's when your last hope is gone that there's a mourning and a sighing of a kind that will precede everlasting joy. So those that are coming from Russia now need to brace themselves. They may be prematurely reciting that verse.

It's the same brother with whom I had the conversation I described, believes that the church is at liberty to fulfill any prophetic scripture that it sees, as if we have carte blanche freedom to fulfill.

So it says the Jews will return, well let's return them. This is God's work, and not to be preempted by zealous, well-meaning Christians who think that they're doing God's service, and might be bringing Jews from the frying pan to the fire.

Prophetic Fulfillment and Human Zeal

The Lord used me to divert Jews out, away from Israel, and to bring them to Germany. When I was in Leipzig, East Germany, about two years ago, on my final morning, Shelly knows the sisters, the Trinitatin Schwestern, a little order of Protestant women who had made contact with the Jewish community in Central Asia, and thought automatically that they would encourage these Jews to go to Israel.

I woke up on the final morning of my departure clearly with such a sense in my spirit that they would have come to Leipzig. I went to Schwestern, remember the leader of the, yeah, and I communicated that to her with such an anointing and authority from the Lord that she completely changed her view, and today, twenty-five Jews from that Central Asian community are in Leipzig.

First the man, then his wife, then his children, then his parents and his grandparents, his bubba's and zeta's and cousins, and one of those families living with the sisters themselves in a new facility that God has given to these sisters with an apartment upstairs, and learning that these Jews are not any cream puff, and that there are all kinds of problems, and they are Central Asian Jews and not European Jews, and different mentalities, and here are these German sisters downstairs with their icons and their Byzantine Christian stuff of the mother and child, and here are these Jews upstairs having their Passover Seder completely unrelated to these sisters downstairs having their Easter, and I saw in that the wisdom of God.

That's why they must be sifted through the nations, to challenge our Christianity, our views, our concepts, our traditional and inadequate understandings of the faith. Until we can communicate the faith to Jews as being their faith and the faith of their God, we don't have it ourselves in the measure that we ought.

So God has multiple strategies and purposes in sifting them through the nations, because I'm watching these German sisters being sifted. They were beside themselves. Pray for us. You got us into this.

You pray for us. This is over our heads. We don't know what to do with these people. They don't understand. They see it this way. I said, oh, praise God. Not that they'll be exempt from trials elsewhere in the world, but I would just on the face of it say, if it were my own life involved in my family, I would rather take my risks in finding my way through the wilderness of the nations to discover God and to return as redeemed than I would to go directly to the land that is going to be, what's the word for that?

The fire, the crucible. You see what I mean? So to do something mechanically because, oh, it says they're going to return, well, then let's return them, is a devastating error. It's not unlike nor akin to Moses killing an Egyptian and burying him in the sand.

It's the same well-meaning zeal out of human intelligence thinking, well, I got a call. Isn't this the way you do it? And not realizing there's another way that it's done, and it's done in God's own time and not before.

Prayer for God’s Mind and Timing

Believers will say, well, how then ought we to pray? You know, we've been praying to get rid of Arafat. We've been praying the Lord, you know, bring Jews to Israel. We've been praying all kinds of good things that our human intelligence seems to suggest.

And my answer is saving the world that it can't even get a mosquito. The answer is that this puts a new and deeper premium on prayer than would otherwise have been required of us. We can no longer get by with facile intelligent prayers of what we think would be appropriate.

Lord do this, Lord do that. We need to get the mind of the Lord because his mind is not our mind. And we might find that he has strategies that would even offend us. But if we don't, we would likely find ourselves praying in opposition to God and doing things in opposition to God.

And so it's going to require a sonship and an obedience and a walk of such carefulness by the Spirit as nothing else would have required of us. And that also is in the purposes of God. You see what I mean?

You know, just may I say this, that I would suspect that an obedience to God today by his very nature will put you in a place of opposition with most saints, at least to the point of being misunderstood, if not to the point of being opposed.

And as for myself, I have never been in a place of greater calumny, name calling, rejection, called false prophet, called enemy of the church, called enemy of Israel as I have now in what I think has been, so far as I understand it, purest obedience.

So that's true. That is a statement of the distance between a true walk of last days obedience as against playing this in a kiddie way by the numbers and mechanically. So already there's an urgency to be sons and daughters led exclusively by the Spirit, though you'll not be understood by others who are not walking quite in that way.

Shouldn't you be doing something? You'll seem to be... The first cry that came when I spoke this Ezekiel 37 message in Jerusalem was, loveless, loveless you're accused of being without love because you're suggesting a painful scenario as if that you were loving, you would have a much softer view and there's no answer.

You just you bear that. Okay. 16, you will also suck the milk of nations. By the way, notice how many references to nations have already been made in this one text. What can we say about this? That we have and are coming to an hour when the faith will no longer be a Sunday church matter.

Israel and the Nations in God’s Cosmic Program

It will be the issue of nations. The issue of Israel is the commencement and the revealing and the open now dealing of God with nations. They the first and then with them and by them subsequently all nations.

We have to shift gears. What do you mean by that? I mean that up till now we have thought only in terms of individual personal salvation. What we need to understand is God is moving from that dispensation now to the moving with and toward nations.

Israel is central to all the nations and that was true from the very first. The powers of darkness have known it better than us and it's for that reason that they have sought Israel's annihilation. Because to remove Israel as a nation is to ensure the fact that the powers of darkness would continue to be the false rulers of the nations.

But for Israel to come into its place as a nation before the God who has established nations then means the end of the false rule and the coming of the true theocratic rule of God over his own creation in the nations.

So we've got to come to this consciousness and awareness that this is why the stakes are so great. This is this is why the dealings are so severe. This is why the persecutions will be so monumental. What will underline underlay the enormous vehemence against Israel against the Jew that to find so much as one and to root them out is the relentless fury of the powers of darkness to extirpate that entire people from the face of the earth so there is no possibility of their national restoration.

Got the idea? Look at Ezekiel 32, I'm sorry, Deuteronomy 32, from verse 8. When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel.

For the Lord's portion is his people. Jacob is the allotment of his inheritance. This is a one moment when God lifts the veil on his cosmic program that shows the centrality of Israel as a nation in the context of all nations, that he has determined the number of them and their location in relationship to one nation central to them all, Israel.

He's determined even the number of the nations according to the sons of Israel. I have to confess, I don't know what that means. It's a mystery. And God just lifting the veil a little bit there to give us a little light emitted.

But enough to say this, that whatever that means, this much is clear, that nations are not independent entities separate from Israel, but coordinate to it. And that's why the heathen rage, that's why the, what is it saying in Psalm 2?

The kings and the rulers take thought against them. They're foaming at the mouth. They don't want that submittedness to the program of God. They want their own autonomy, their own sovereignty, independent of God and that nation to which they must be connected by God in his theocratic rule.

And that's the whole, that's the cosmic setting for the whole drama of Israel's restoration in the last days. It's not just an ancient people being restored. That's sentimental to see it that way. It's God's fulfilling of his cosmic program for the nations through that one nation appointed to be the locus of his rule to all nations.

Israel’s Irrevocable Calling as a Priestly Nation

And that's why Paul, who was the apostle to the Gentiles, which is to say the apostle to the goyim, which is the same word for nations, said, you see in me a man before the time. I'm born out of time and out of joy.

What does he mean by that? I am a symbolic statement of an apostolate which belongs to my entire people, Israel. The whole nation is called to be apostolic, to be sent into the nations. And what does Paul say in Romans 11?

The gifts and callings of God are without repentance, that they're irrevocable. What is Israel's central calling? A nation of priests, the word nation, and a light unto the world. So here is God finally establishing, not before God, but after God, because of Israel's willingness, but even opposed to their own willingness to be chosen, the fulfillment of what he has called for from the beginning, for his gifts and callings are irrevocable, even over and against the unwilling nation to perform it, which is the statement to his glory and not to ours.

There's nothing that is calculated in this by which Israel is to receive any acknowledgment as being virtuous in itself. On the contrary, it's exactly because of Israel's failure and even unwillingness that the glory of God is more demonstrably revealed in a grace that rules, overrules Israel's reluctance and even apostasy and yet establishes his will for her.

That's the final testimony of God, not only to Israel itself, but to all the nations. So we need to come into this consciousness of nations. So you will suck the milk of nations and will suck the breast of kings.

Then you will know that I am the Lord. I, the Lord, am your savior, your redeemer, the mighty one of Jacob. Then you'll know. And I'll tell you, it's such a knowing. There's knowing and knowing, I'm always so fond of saying.

This knowing is a supreme, ultimate, and final knowing. And except that Israel attained to it, how shall Israel bless all the families of the earth? True blessedness is communicating the knowledge of God as he in fact is and not what nations suppose him to be.

And only the nation that knows God as God can convey him rightly. Then you will know. You'll really know that I'm the God of resurrection because I raised you from the dead. You'll not be speaking some theoretical thing.

You'll testify of the power that has taken you out of the graves from every nation where I've called you and I've restored you and I've put flesh on your bones and my spirit within you and set you in your land to rebuild the cities that were wasted and devastated.

Then you will know. That word then, you know, like God so long wanting, so long waiting for that acknowledgment and that knowledge of himself by his own people. And what shall we say if it could have been obtained in some less expensive way, without devastation, would he not have given it?

What a statement to our stiff-neckedness and our apostasy and our opposition to God, which he acknowledges. They are the enemies of the Gospel for your sake. What does Stephen say in his address that resulted in his martyrdom?

As your fathers did, so do you also. You do always grieve the Spirit of God. And to grieve the Holy Spirit of God is to grieve God. That's our history. Can you see how much greater is God's triumph? How much greater is his glory?

The Glory of God in Israel’s Final Restoration

To take that very people who have blasphemed his name in every nation and make of them the pinnacle and the showpiece of his eternal glory, that nations will beat a path to worship the God of Jacob in that place and bring their treasure and bow before that people whom he will call with a new name and they will be called the priests and the servants of the Most High God.

This is the drama, saints. This is the setting, see? And if we don't see this, what does our faith mean? What does it mean, the Holy Spirit and gifts of the Spirit and church government and relationship?

They're little pieces of abstraction, except that they're set into the context of God's cosmic intention, which concludes the age. So instead of bronze, I'll bring gold. Instead of iron, I'll bring silver.

Instead of wood, bronze. Instead of stones, iron. And I will make peace, your administrators, and righteousness, your overseers. Violence will not be heard again in your land, nor devastation or destruction within your borders.

Sorry to say, dear Israel, but brace yourselves. This implies to me that there's a violence and a devastation and a destruction that must come and that must be experienced within your borders. And look how Israel is now scrambling to avoid anything that approaches this by even attacking Lebanon and driving out, what was it, 150 ,000 or 500 ,000 Lebanese people from their homes in order to so register a violent reaction against the Hezbollah, the Muslim terrorists, so that they would not have any base of operation by which they could throw their rockets into the northern communities of Israel.

They're desperate, desperate, desperate. How do you dare trample on the sovereignty of another nation? I mean, imagine Israel, imagine the United States opening fire on Mexico and wiping out entire communities and leaving them in rubble and ruin and setting back their economy for a half century with tens of thousands of casualties because there's some threat to our nation by some activity emanating from there.

You don't do that. Israel is doing it. Why? It has no alternative. They have not God for their defense and a required, just any human scheme that somehow will set back the threat that comes to it from nations that border it.

But will it set it back or will it set in motion yet deeper reaction, deeper revulsion, deeper retaliation to get back at those? You see, it's a losing, it's a no-win situation that finally will eventuate in what we're reading here.

Millennial Light, Mourning, and Everlasting Glory

I'm just giving a sketch of the apocalyptic content of the last days and the necessary travail and devastation that Israel must experience, but what comes out of it is the everlasting joy. But you will call your wall salvation, your gates praise.

No longer will you have the sun for light by day, nor for brightness will be the moon give you light, for you will have the Lord for an everlasting light and your God for your glory. That's clearly, unequivocally the statement of millennial glory, the Lord himself dwelling in and ruling from a restored nation and where the Lord is, so is his light also, an everlasting light and a light of such a kind that it eclipses and makes unnecessary the light of day or of the moon by night.

Your sun will set no more, neither will your moon wane, for you will have the Lord for an everlasting light and the days of your mourning will be finished. Here again, again and again, as you look through the scriptures, there's always a conjunction of the, a statement of great hope, the climax of the age, the consummation of all things, the everlasting glory, the presence of God, but right up to it, mourning, right up to it, devastation, sorrow, fear, insecurity, violence, then all your people will be righteous, all who survive that is and are restored, for he says, I will purge out those that rebel against me and transgress against me.

They will possess the land forever. Here again, everlasting forever. This is it. This is the finality. This is brought into the millennial age and into the things that are eternal. The branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I may be glorified, not that Israel might be glorified.

That's not God's point. He is his own point that I might be glorified. Of course, only a God can restore a nation out of such devastation as is described here. The smallest one will become a clan, the least one a mighty nation, and I, the Lord, will hasten it in its time.