ROCK OF THE PLAIN

Part 3: Reaching the Plain

By C.C.

Scripture citations are to the King James

(Authorised) Version, unless noted otherwise.

Behold, I am against thee, O inhabitant of the valley, and rock of the plain, saith the Lord; which say, Who shall come down against us? or who shall enter into our habitations? But I will punish you according to the fruit of your doings, saith the Lord: and I will kindle a fire in the forest thereof, and it shall devour all things round about it.

— Jer. 21: 13, 14 —

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fortress on the rock IN THE PRECEDING instalment we considered the definition and role of ʻempireʼ, with particular emphasis on the British Empire and how it used its power and influence to prepare the way for the repatriation of the Jewish people to Palestine, culminating in the establishment of Israel as a nation state on 14 May 1948. We noted that Britain's role in this development uneven though it may have been was a fulfilment of Bible prophecy.

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Jerusalem . . . shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the time of the Gentiles be fulfilled.

— Jesus (Luke 21: 24) —

Under the figure of Jerusalem, standing for the Jews as a whole, Jesusʼ prophesied the trouble which would crash in on the people, when the imperial Roman army under Vespasian besieged and then assaulted the city in A.D. 69-70. Many Jews were killed. Those who had escaped before the vice closed around them scattered into the surrounding countries, to suffer long centuries under Gentile domination. The ʻuntilʼ signified that their eventual rebirth as a nation would also be accompanied by times of persecution and warfare.

Many years before the outbreak of the Great War, Bible Students had looked to 1914 as the year when these ʻGentile timesʼ would come to a violent end in war and world anarchy, simultaneously delivering Israel and precipitating the downfall of a corrupt Christendom and European civilisation, followed soon after by the setting up of Christ's kingdom on earth. Events did not unfold as expected.

In 1901 Charles Taze Russell, a lucid teacher on biblical matters, wrote that

. . . there is scarcely time enough to permit a panic and period of general prostration and then another period of prosperity and inflation and another panic, etc., by the time which we think the Scriptures indicate as the time for the great cataclysm of trouble; by which the present institutions of Christendom are all to go down in anarchistic chaos. The culmination of the trouble in October, 1914, is clearly marked in the Scriptures; and we are bound therefore to expect a beginning of that severe trouble not later than 1910; with severe spasms between now and then Views from the Watch Tower (September 15, 1901; Zion’s Watch Tower, Allegheny, USA), pp. 292, 293.

And here:

The full end of the times of the Gentiles . . . will be reached in A.D. 1914; . . . that date will be the farthest limit of the rule of imperfect men. . . . [A]t that date the Kingdom of God . . . will obtain full, universal control, and that it will then be “set up,” or firmly established, in the earth, on the ruins of present institutions.— The Time is at Hand (1914, republished ed., by Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society, Brooklyn, USA), pp. 76, 77.

Russell’s prediction that 1914 would mark the beginning of the ‘time of trouble’ of Matthew 24: 21 proved to be uncannily accurate. That clash of nations shaped the world we live in now, and we should not underestimate its significance. But he did hedge his forecasts. Speaking at a Bible Students convention in 1911 he said:

We are expecting in October, 1914, that a great change will be due. Now, how quickly will it come? Whether on the stroke of the clock or not we do not know. We believe that it will land upon humanity by that time. Perhaps some of it will come before that, but we believe it will be stayed off until that time. Now, dear friends, what if it does not? We are just as well off as the rest. That is what the Bible states. If it does not state that to you, we have no quarrel. And if it does not come we will not try to bring it about. But, on the contrary, we will try to practice peace and holiness withal. We are children of peace and peacemakers, not strife breeders. But we believe the Bible teaches October, 1914, as the time. If that is incorrect for a year, or five, or one hundred years, no matter, it is coming some time, whether we have it right or not. [Emphasis added.] Transcript of Convention Report Sermons, p. 292.

In hindsight it is obvious that the prophecies then awaiting fulfilment the establishment of the nation of Israel, the collapse of Christendom and the social structure in world anarchy, and others could not have been accomplished as quickly as Russell and his followers had anticipated. He acknowledged this in October 1916, when the Great War was already two years old:

We could not, of course, know in 1889 [when The Time Is At Hand was first published], whether the date 1914, so clearly marked in the Bible as the end of the Gentile lease of power or permission to rule the world, would mean that they would be fully out of power at that time, or whether, their lease expiring, their eviction would begin. The latter we perceive to be the Lord’s program; and promptly in August, 1914, the Gentile kingdoms referred to in the prophecy began the present great struggle, which, according to the Bible, will culminate in the complete overthrow of all human government, opening the way for the full establishment of the Kingdom of God’s dear Son. [Emphasis added] — The Time is at Hand (Paul S. L. Johnson, ed; Philadelphia, USA, 1935), p. vi (Foreword).

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Let my people go.

— Moses (Ex. 7: 16) —

Israel is the Hinge of History. Never herself a world empire, ancient Israel was always a vexation and ʻburdensome stoneʼ to the powerful Gentile nations around her, to whom she was sometimes captive (Zech. 12: 2, 3). And the same is true today. The Palestinian-Israeli question, one of the world's more intractable problems, tackled by popes, presidents, pundits and presidents, is never far from the news headlines. The Middle East is today what it has long been a crossroads of crisis, on which great empires have been made and broken.

In his book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, historian Benny Morris writes:

. . . . Palestine was ambiguously omitted from the future Arab domain (in the letter of 24th October 1915 from Henry McMahon, Britain's high commissioner in Egypt, to the Hashemite sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali). Instead, it was alternatively vouchsafed for future Anglo-French condominium (in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 3rd January 1916) and, more vaguely, as a Jewish ʻnational homeʼ (in the Balfour Declaration of 2nd November 1917). That one-sentence declaration by the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour ʻHis Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other countryʼ was to be seen by the Zionist movement, which had vigorously lobbied for it, as a historic breakthrough and a basis for its future sovereignty over Palestine. And indeed, the British, including Balfour, and despite the avoidance of the word state, regarded the embodied promise as necessarily leading to self-determination. ʻMy personal hope is that the Jews will make good in Palestine and eventually found a Jewish State. It is up to them now; we have given them their opportunity,ʼ Balfour was to say three months later. The Arabs, who greeted the declaration with ʻbewilderment and dismay,ʼ came to regard it as a (negative) milestone, an act of betrayal. Thereafter, no matter what the British did to the contrary, the Arab world was to regard London as the protector and facilitator of Zionism.

The British had been driven by Zionist lobbying, spearheaded by the able, charming Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish chemist who had made Britain his home. But Weizmann had been preaching to the converted to the extent that many in the imperial cabinet, including Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Balfour himself, had long been philo-Zionists, for Protestant religious and humanitarian reasons. To be sure, there had also been imperial concerns: a British-created Jewish state might help guard the eastern approaches to that vital waterway, the Suez Canal, only recently imperiled by the Turks. And empowering the Jews in Palestine might reap rewards among the Jews of the United States and Russia, whose goodwill the British wanted, against the backdrop of World War I, either to acquire or sustain. – Yale University Press; 2008, pp. 9, 10.

The Zionist Movement: Religious and Secular

In the late nineteenth century most of the world's Jews lived in imperial Russia. Beginning around 1881, government-sanctioned pogroms (massacres) forced large numbers of them to flee the country, many seeking refuge in Palestine. This was no accident of history. As prophesied by Jeremiah, God had sent ʻfishers and huntersʼ in the shape of Zionism and the tough love of persecution to compel them to return to their ancient home (Jer. 16: 14-16). The First World War was a continuation of this process, one which affected most countries.

Viewed solely through the lens of secular history, the 1914-18 conflict was an unmitigated disaster, a terminal assault on European civilisation. But from the divine standpoint, the principal aim of the war was to prepare conditions conducive to the settlement of the Jewish people in their land of promise. When the British General Allenby captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks in 1917, a new phase of history began. During the 1920s and ʼ30s large numbers of Jews quit Europe and made their ʻreturnʼ (aliyah) to Palestine, which had by then become a British protectorate.

By 1938 Adolf Hitler's regime was evicting all Jews from Germany. By 1941 it was consigning them to prison camps and ghettos. And by 1942 Jews in German-occupied territories were hunted down and exterminated on an industrial scale in a thousand death camps a holocaust of unspeakable brutality, liquidating millions of lives and the faith of many of those who survived, scarred and broken.

Tarrying Still

A number of Russell's expectations regarding 1914 and its aftermath remain unfulfilled. The obvious fact that the world still goes on a century later demonstrates that the eviction and dissolution of the Gentile powers is a much longer and more complicated process than any one person could have anticipated. Nonetheless, the year was an indispensable historical milestone. Without 1914 there would have been no 1948.

Though modern Israel is by rights an independent nation, she is not free to act as she might. She is still circumscribed by the ongoing Gentile pre-eminence in world affairs, particularly by the role of an imperial United States, which can (and may yet) exert political, diplomatic and economic pressures against her to comply with its own far-reaching national interests. And she will remain the victim of much political pushing and pulling for years to come. Israel is still the tail and not yet the head (Deut. 28: 13).

Full liberation for Israel cannot come until the (formerly) Christian west completes the ransacking of its own institutions.

Continues

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June 2014. The usual and natural author rights are asserted, except that you may reproduce this article in whole or in part without express permission, but please acknowledge its source.

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