Post by Daniel on May 18, 2018 6:56:24 GMT -5
Israel’s Vote and Joel’s Prophecy
Terry James
Days leading up to the Tuesday, March 17, 2014 vote by the Israeli people brought from liberal journalists every possible reason why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should lose and a more conciliatory government be installed.
Until the American presidential election of 2016, I had never heard such announced polling data forecasting a likely win that turned out to be so starkly wrong. Leading up to that Israeli election, the American press predicted a close race with Hertzog, Netanyahu’s opponent for prime minister, to be in the lead right up until the exit polls began on election day. Then it changed to “the election has tightened.”
Benjamin Netanyahu, as it turned out, claimed victory relatively early–so dramatically in his party’s favor had the voting gone. –This, even despite the American president having sent an election advisory team to Israel to help Netanyahu’s political opposition. I must admit that, like I did in the 2016 election of President Trump, I basked in the results of that election. At that time, I envied the people who had the good sense to re-elect the type leader (through their own brand of party politics) that I hoped we in America would be wise enough to elect again one day, should the world wag on in its precipitous state for a time yet.
While contemplating all of this–how pleased I was with the election results–I was brought back in a moment of epiphany to the deeper reality of what it all might mean in terms of God’s prophetic Word.
Benjamin Netanyahu made one campaign adjustment at the last minute that–my spiritual senses reminded–seemed to make the difference in his momentum toward re-election. He promised that if his government was returned to leadership, he would not allow a two-state solution to the ongoing Palestinian conflict with Israel.
We now get a sense of exactly the import of the prime minister’s speech before Congress on March 3, 2014. He laid out his case for why Israel must be on alert at all times against Iran and all of its enemy neighbors. At the heart of the hatred for Israel, of course, is the very point of the two-state solution much of the world of the diplomatic realm wants to force upon the Jewish state. At the same time, the Iranian antagonists and all other of the Islamist peoples surrounding Israel want only a one-state solution. They have voiced it many, many times since the establishment of Israel in 1948. Nasser, Sadat, and most every leader of Arab nations and of terrorist organizations in the Middle East have declared that they want Israel off the land it “occupies.”
They, in fact, have often, like the Nazis, proclaimed that the Jew is the problem with the lack of “peace” in the region and world. Every Jew should, therefore, be expunged from the earth.
There has been conjecture among those who watch the issues and events of the times, analyzing them in light of Bible prophecy. Many indicated they sensed that if Benjamin Netanyahu had lost the election, thus putting a Hertzog government in power, the results thereof would have increased the speed in dividing the land, thus bring on Armageddon.
The prophecy by Joel the prophet reads: “I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land” (Joel 3: 2).
I understand where those considering the prophecy might reasonably conclude that dividing the land spoken here speaks to a future time when, for example, Antichrist causes the land to be divided as part of the covenant of Daniel 9: 26. Or, perhaps the dividing of the land might be thought to mean a precursor agreement such as one made by Obama and John Kerry or some others in the Roadmap to Peace process.
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