Though The Nations May Rage

by:  Lonnie Lane

God reveals who He is through His relationship with Israel. He is the God of promises and of covenant, all of which we know about only because of His promises and covenants with Israel. If we try to understand God apart from His relationship with Israel we will miss a great deal of revelation and understanding of God. This is why Christians who are New Testament only believers have very little power in their lives. Their understanding of God is partial and consequently to a large extent far less powerful than it would be if they understood God’s holiness as He revealed it to Israel. We learn of God’s passion for His people as we see His interactions with Israel, and the depths of His longing for His people to be with Him, and to worship Him, so He can impart His love back to them and bring them into His presence. Through Israel’s king, we learn that we can enter His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts, that is, His manifested presence with praise. I suspect that many Christians do not know what it is to be in God’s presence, to feel His immanent presence, or to be lost in His goodness. May I suggest if you’re one of them, get to know His love and passion for Israel and you’ll see parts of God that you may not have known before. And if you do not share His love for Israel, you may be exempt from His love because His love begins with Israel and still extends to Israel today.  

When you grasp God’s ways with Israel, in the commandments and in God’s desire for them to be a people with a Kingdom mindset, who would understand righteousness and justice, it changes us to want to be more like He is. There is a holy reverential fear of God in His ways with Israel that can be entirely missed if one is unaware of God’s dealings with her. As we read and enter into Israel’s life with God, we are sensitized to His distinctions for what is clean and unclean, righteous and unrighteous, holy and unholy, loving and unloving. All of which are revealed through the way God walks with Israel through the centuries. His love for Israel is abounding in the way He woos her when she strays, rebukes Her when she backslides, restores her to Himself when she cries out to Him, and pours out His favor upon her when she walks with Him in love. We can’t grasp that from the New Testament alone. Because the New Testament stands on the shoulders of the Old Testament, God expects His people to be familiar with both in order to know Him.

As for the Old Testament being relevant for us today, I would venture to say it is of the utmost importance for us today to know of God’s commitment and love for Israel. To miss that is to misunderstand God! And it’s also to misunderstanding what is going on in the world at this time. It’s that critical. God seems to be forcing the matter for us all to be aware of His relationship with Israel today. The United Nations (UN), which supposedly represents all nations in the world for the benefit of all its member nations, is presently dealing with the decision to force the relinquishing of land Israel gained in the ’67 war, incidentally which Israel won by God’s grace and empowerment, even though they didn’t start it.

Israel has been a member of the U.N. since November 5, 1949. Prior to that it was the UN’s decision to grand Israel her own land in 1948 that made Israel a state for the first time in over 1800 years. Now tell me God wasn’t in that. The UN may have made the decision but God made it possible. But the United Nations has too often been more united against Israel than with her. Of the 175 UN Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel.  Of the 690 UN General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel. Israel’s just not that big to have caused all that dissention. Something else must be behind it. Why are the nations so against Israel? Why have they been accused of racism because they call themselves Zionists? Zion is the mountain where David ruled the nation from, and it is what God calls His holy mountain. Twenty-five times in Scripture God calls Zion in Jerusalem “My holy mountain.” And so satan hates it. And he is working as hard as he can to get rid of a Jewish Jerusalem.

The wars with Israel’s Arab neighbors is not really about land, it’s about “spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). The Bible prophesies that: “It will come about also in that day that a great trumpet will be blown, and those who were perishing in the land of Assyria and who were scattered in the land of Egypt will come and worship the LORD in the holy mountain at Jerusalem” (Isaiah 27:13). Can you imagine Assyrians or Egyptians today looking forward to “that day”? I don’t think so, unless they know Yeshua is Lord, that is. So you can see why satan is so against Israel. But to learn of God’s unending love for Israel is to align yourself with God’s love for Israel. To love God fully, we must love what He loves and that would include Israel.

Not that everyone is Israel knows it, but Israel is all about God’s sovereignty and who He is as Lord of all. The world lies in the lap of the evil one because God allows it for a season. Each person, and in fact each nation, gets to choose which side they will align themselves with, God or the devil, even though most people do not know it’s the devil they side with. It goes to show you that God will do what God will do to keep His promises and His covenant with Israel regardless of what the nations of the world plan to do. Such national ranting against God and Zion are not new, and have been going on for a long time. Hear what King David had to say on the subject:

Why are the nations in an uproar 
And the peoples devising a vain thing? 
The kings of the earth take their stand 
And the rulers take counsel together 
Against the LORD and against His Anointed, saying, 
“Let us tear their fetters apart 
And cast away their cords from us!”

He who sits in the heavens laughs, 
The Lord scoffs at them. 
Then He will speak to them in His anger 
And terrify them in His fury, saying, 
“But as for Me, I have installed My King 
Upon Zion, My holy mountain.”

This would seem to be saying that the real reason that nations, the kings of the earth, and the rulers are taking counsel together against Israel is a hatred for God, and where He has established Himself and His King upon Zion, Jerusalem, His holy mountain. They hate God’s ways of righteousness and justice and see them as “fetters” (chains). David may have been the king at one time, but it is King Yeshua who will reign from the New Jerusalem as sovereign God, and there will be no satan to war against Him, and no rulers to do anything, but come up to worship Him. In the end, God wins.  In fact, He never lost.

So now, it appears from Psalm 2 that God isn’t the least bit threatened by the UN decisions or threat of decisions against Israel. He continues to bless Israel and to fulfill His word to Abraham that the land would be theirs forever (Genesis 14:13-14) and that the world would be blessed by his descendents (18:18). God goes right on blessings Israel right in the middle of her Arab neighbor’s lands, with all their oil and the money that comes from it. You know how God told Israel that one of the reasons He chose her was that she was the least of all the nations. God loves to make good out of what is least. That way we don’t miss the fact that it is God Himself that causes the increase and not we ourselves. Israel takes up only 1/6 of 1% of the land mass of the Middle East, and yet she, by the grace of God, is a land reflective of His goodness in the great bounty produced in Israel in the fulfillment of His promise to bless her and to bless the world.

The same land that for centuries was in the hands of other nations, including her Arab neighbors, sat barren and desolate for centuries and only when the Jews returned to the land and began to reclaim it, did the desert begin to bloom. Regardless of what the nations and their rules may plan, God will have His plans for Israel come to pass. In the midst of all the troubles, following are some of the blessings of God upon Israel and to the world through Israel. My boasting is in God.

Economics:
    Israel has the largest number of startup companies per capita in the world.
    Israel is the world's largest wholesale diamond center, surpassing Antwerp in the 1970's.  
    Most of the cut & polished diamonds in the world come from Israel.
    Israel has the largest number of NASDAQ listed companies outside of the US and Canada.
    Israel was the first country to have a free trade agreement with the United States.
    Apart from the Silicon Valley, Israel has the highest concentration of hi-tech companies in the world.

Electronics:
    The cell phone was developed in Israel.
   The Voice Mail technology was developed in Israel.
   In the early 80's, IBM chose an Israeli-designed computer chip as the brains for their first personal computers.
   The first anti-virus software for computers was developed in Israel in 1979.
   Most of the Windows NT and XP operating systems were developed in Israel.

Microsoft:
    Both the Pentium-4 and Centrino processors were entirely designed, developed and produced in Israel.
   The Pentium MMX Chip technology was designed in Israel at Intel.
   Israel has the highest number of home computers per capita in the world.
   The technology for the AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ was developed in 1996 by four young Israelis.
   Israel was the first Middle Eastern country to launch a satellite, the Ofek 1, on September 19, 1988.

Culture:    
    Hebrew is the only case of a dead national language being revived in all of world history.  
    Hebrew had not been spoken as a native tongue by anyone for centuries. Today it is the native tongue of millions of people.
    Israel has more museums per capita than any other nation in the world.
    Israel has more orchestras per capita than any other nation in the world.
    Israel publishes more books per capita than any other nation in the world.
    Israel publishes more books translated from other languages than any other nation in the world.
    Israel reads more books per capita than any other nation in the world.
    The most independent and free Arabic press in the Middle East is in Israel.

Military/Security:
    Israel has the largest fleet of F-16 aircraft outside of the US.
    Israel has the world's most impenetrable airline security.
    Israel spends more money per capita on its own protection than any country in the world.

Other:
     Israel's dairy cows are the most productive dairy cows in the world.  
     They average 25,432 pounds of milk per cow per year, compared to just 18,747 pounds from American cows; 17,085 from Canadian cows; 13,778 from European Union cows; 10,207 from Australian cows; and 6,600 from Chinese cows.
     Israel has more in-vitro fertilization per capita than anywhere in the world, and it's free.
     Israelis, per capita, are the world's biggest consumers of fruits and vegetables. 

Reprint of this article is permitted as long as you use the following; Use by permission by Messianic Vision, www.sidroth.org, 2011. 

Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible Copyright ©1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif.  All rights reserved. Used by permission.