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Chapter 1

BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVE

News 407

THE STATE OF THE ELECTION IN ISRAEL FEBRUARY 2009

The State of the Case and the Signals of the Chase

in the Light of the Bible's Forthright Foretelling

HAARETZ on this day, February 13, 2009, contains many fascinating articles and news items concerning Israel's recent election and war, and their correlation. These range from an investigation into a danger of a holy war concept, from the Israeli viewpoint, one intruding into moral aspects of the incursion into Gaza, as Israel seeks to defend its citizens from this blatant brigandage. What aggravates the situation beyond merely having consistent bombs landing in a neighbouring country, it is the fact that Gaza itself is the gift of grace by Israel to the Palestinians; yet though so given, it has been so viciously misused to harass Israel from nearer, that it becomes returning evil for good. It is like giving candy to a kid, who then poisoning it, puts it in your tea.

It seems that an army paper on procedure given to a small body of troops apparently included indications that sometimes cruelty was necessary. In fact, it is notable how much humanitarian zeal Israel has shown to people who have been hurt on the other side, how much restraint; and indeed, news is that Barak is requiring current restraint under provocation, as part of a policy not to let things move like escaping steam into scalding, in the current situation. Meanwhile there is also news of a ship from Iran containing arms which has been lodged in Cyprus, perhaps to be returned, but not so the contents; and this little voyage of arms to Israel's attackers, allegedly is in violation of ruling not allowing Iranian arms to be so transferred.

In case any fume inwardly, let us be clear. IF someone lobs bombs on your home or property, there is a situation requiring action. If they are DEDICATED EXPLICITLY to your destruction, then this is a more major situation. If they keep it up for years, one asks whether you are deficient, the locality is an administrative desert or without funds or other ingredients of defence and order, or what other amazing restraint may be activating your patience and deferring your harassment or removal of this threat. If in the case of a nation, it leads to war after years, this is scarcely surprising. If it led to incursions and restrictions on travel with respect to your home (or homeland), over those years, this is nothing quite amazing. It would amazing if you did less. If in the end, a war is needed, and the bombs keep up their perennial vigil of violence, then to characterise you as a militant and heartless rogue would seem an exercise in cartoonesque nonsense, rather than in anything which could be rightly allied with sanity.

No nation approximates perfection; but to criticise defence in such a case after such a gift, and eventual response to violence from a gifted territory: this stresses the imagination, and were it not that it is often so taxed in this now clearly failing world, this would itself be a matter of prodigy!

Again, in the squirming and burning of the affair, before, during and after the Israeli incursion, rockets continue to come from the recipients of Gaza, who took over by force from Fatah when things were moving jointly, in that area; and the landing of these less than peaceful missives at this point, though harmlessly on the Negev, is not so very irenic.

No nation likes to receive rocket attacks over the years, far less from territory recently ceded to the aggressors. It is apparent that not peace with Israel, but elimination of it is the aim. This may not be so with all of Islam, but with the Hamas Palestinian as with the Iranian groups involved, and in the latter case, the President, this appears clearly the case.

THE BACKGROUND TO THE BATTLE-GROUND
AND THE BATTLE OF THE ELECTION

It becomes so fascinating because God is clearly of a different mind. He will neither allow Israel to be of a mind to be culturally assimilable (and that includes religion) to this world's gutted ways, nor joyously footloose and fancy free, as the divorced partner of the Almighty in His movement to bring many in this earth back to Himself, before it is loosed from existence. To be sure, the elimination of this universe (II Peter 3, Matthew 24:35) is to follow the Lord's exemplification of righteous rule on this earth, as in Psalm 72, Isaiah 11, Isaiah 65, Micah 7 and so on. This tension between general and specific sin, and attacking and receiving peoples in THAT CONTEXT, is what comes always when you are abusing your mind, body or spirit by this or that fancy, and yet trying to preserve its life. Israel is being disciplined and preserved; and its assailants but prepare for the final confrontation with the One who having a mind and will of His own, and owning the universe by making it, does not cede 'rights' to it, to those who claim them whether for themselves or others.

Israel is divinely supported as part of the plan which is filled with pity and mercy (cf. Deuteronomy 32, Micah 7), and its return has been in the face of 'odds' from a secular viewpoint, so massively negative as to make this nothing short of a modern miracle that it subsists on this soil at all. It was to happen and had to happen, Israel to go as in Leviticus 26 and indicated in Matthew 24, but to return as in Ezekiel 36ff., Micah 7, Deuteronomy 32, Luke 21:24, and not to evaporate.

The focus given to the wars of nations to exterminate Israel since its return, in particular to the 1967 war, to which LIFE magazine contributed an entire issue of photographic intensity, has been enormous; as has the admiration for the remarkable tactics and astounding success in that special war. In the 1973 case, when a nation attacked on its chief Holy Day, so placing Israel in danger, the promised land called up reservists and soon had encircled an Egyptian army on the FAR SIDE of the Suez Canal, so that Russia starting making threats. A report in Intelligence Digest concerning that time, indicated nuclear alert eventuated, in terms of a great nation, and implicit threat.

For all that, this war of 1973 was not a mouse against a lion, but an ant against a bull! But the ant won.

It is perhaps time for some more in this world to realise that when you are fighting God and with something near to spiritual insanity imagining that

	1) you can call parts of this world the PROPERTY (as some in Australia are doing) of people who happen to have occupied segments of it, when not they but God made it, and
	2) all or most of His universe becomes the property of those who do not even inhabit such a domain but merely dwell in certain cosmic sections of it, and do not remain that of the One who made it all;
	or 3) as in the Middle East, parts of it automatically become the property of some who at some times have occupied some parts of it:

it is not in the running for congratulation.

Leaving out God, as in the case of Israel - when He has made His position so clear with what He made, and justice and not words without evidence is one of His unfailing and unflagging interests - is like leaving out numbers when seeking to check up on your income tax. God's word and will is constitutive of the situation; and while man has marvellously in one of the greatest acts of creation of all time, been divinely given the liberty

	of logic (to confuse, abuse or use it),
	of thought (to sanctify or sacrifice it to lust or deceit with deviousness as the spirit lusts or does not do so),
	of disposition, to love and to hate, with reason or without, and uses it continually:
	God has not abdicated (cf. Acme, Alpha and Omega: Jesus Christ Ch. 8).

Thus you have a certain tension between tirades and truth, aspirations and fulfilments, cheek and check, arrogance and humiliation, decline and decision, arrogance and impotence, as various pseudo-almighty little prodigies pit their pitiful pride against the Almighty. In some cases, both sides on the human side are wrong - that is both sides not only in a conflict with God, but with each other. In this case, God has spoken and man is speaking and the static is becoming horrific to the ear, to the bodies of the slain and the psyches of the tortured.

Israel is far from perfect, but is not alone in this; and it must be acknowledged that they have shown enormous restraint in the face of all but incredible misrepresentation and misuse. Was it not enough that the pogroms of Russia, the persecutions of the Romanist Inquisitions, the centuries of malicious misuse in Europe, the 6 millions slain courtesy of the fanaticism of racist Hitler, the retention by Stalin of millions desiring a better life than that of an atheist commissar of all but unique brutality, a mass murderer of subtlety and heartlessness, so great as to make hell have something to match: was it not sufficient that it must endure these!

Was it necessary that these should be augmented by the UN horrors of 1947, when it sought to internationalise Jerusalem and give to Israel not all of Palestine, as decided by the League of Nations in the 1920s, but bits and pieces here and there! Was it requisite that the poor UN troops withdrew in the war from Egypt, to allow its tanks and troops to set out to overturn little Israel ? that all these things were thrown at the Jews!

Was it not enough that the Palestinian position was such that that 1947 OFFER of the UN was REJECTED by them but accepted by Israel! and that they have warred repeatedly on Israel ever since! Similarly, Jordan admitted many Palestinians into its land, people who given this option (in what after all was a country which had absorbed a large part of the Palestine promised by the League of Nations to Israel); but those of this Palestinian contingent were not content with being there, for it seemed that they had to attack Israel from Jordan now as a BASE (as in the recent conflict, they attacked Israel from the donated Gaza strip, in an even worse situation).

In such ways, there was created such a turmoil that the integrity of Jordan came under threat, and so the Palestinian immigrants were not so welcome! It is understanable, that... When guests threaten your home, there is some tension.

But is it not enough that the declarations of deity, the maker and SO the owner of the land called earth, have been quite clear^*1 regarding Israel, and that from their early arrival and discipline for not entering as in Numbers 14, to enablement under Joshua, and this in terms of a judgment which God had long delayed (as in Genesis 15) on the corruption of those in that land, are express and explicit to these little creations called man. They were sent on a mission, to BE there IN a mission, fouled up the latter and were subjected to exclusion from that very land BY initial warning (Leviticus 26). Thus came the various judgments on ISRAEL ITSELF for it was freely joined to the Lord in its outward approach as in Joshua 24! He did not exempt the people from discipline because He used them, nor did He do so in the case of Babylon, when He used it (cf. Jeremiah 50:29-35).

God has His ways, and wise are they who heed their Maker, exponent of history, presenter of holiness, giver of redemption, and do not try to play God with Him, who works all things after the counsel of His own will (Ephesians 1:11). Whether individual or nation, playing the fool with God and His clear-cut words in the Bible, is not a Russian roulette but charging a bull with a red stick in an open field, and poking it in the ribs. If the bull would roar and react, how much more does God interfere with interference, though His patience is great and His wisdom infinite. You see this in Amos 4, where progressive, cumulative follies brought progressive, cumulative response and these in the end came to this: "Prepare to meet your God!" God is neither irritably impatient nor endlessly permissive. There are limits and the Lord will bring all to account, much even now!

He will not tolerate endlessly either moral corruption on the grand scale in an Israel - or any other, such as was the case in World War II, with both mass-murdering Germany or preempting Japan, and later, mass-murdering and manipulating USSR - which participates in it! The case of Israel is special in terms of mission; but the moral absolutes apply intensively in the end, to all. Those who wantonly leave His life-support which makes man what he is as an operative being (like a garage for your car, but of course much more), suffer and the world suffers and its sufferings become more and more cumulative, and the spirit of rebellion becomes increasingly routine, as if verbal and behavioural vaunting and taunting were a proper process. Children on occasion can fall that way; but this, it is a matter of ... man!

Israel has had a special mission. If that land even thinks of being like the other nations, enjoying their ... 'liberty' and licence, God declares one thing most clearly: IT SHALL NEVER BE! Nor has it been! That is a fact of history and of the divine declaration, these in the normal unison. In fact so great is that unison of what the Lord says and of what history exposes that it is like a very close marriage partnership: the word and the works! As to that "never be" pronouncement, it is to be found in Ezekiel 20:32, in the midst of a substantial historical review of the nation and its ways over time.

To be sure, the situation is now complicated. When God has PROMISED the premiss of a returned Israel, brought them back, premissed the victorious wars against all odds in that latter day circumstances (as in Zechariah 12), prior to His return after crucifixion and to a nation in large measure to be restored in heart when the time comes (as in Zechariah 12:10-13:1 and Ezekiel 36-37) for due development; and when He has likewise foretold the assault forces to come (as in Ezekiel 38-39, Zechariah 12, Micah 7) against Israel, and the result of the assault (as in Deuteronomy 32, Ezekiel 38-39, Micah 7 likewise), the outline is clear (cf. SMR pp. 502ff.). It happens step by step before the face of one born in 1928 and seeing it unwind like the coil of a fern, which opens with magnificent attention to the geometricity^*2 of its minor elements, till a new branch in its magnificence of display is at last to be seen.

In one respect Israel is like a new branch; but more precisely as in Romans 11, and with special emphasis on its spiritual condition soon to come in large measure, it is a RE-GRAFTED BRANCH. Nationally, however, it is indeed a nation born at once, and in this a prodigy as foretold (Isaiah 66:7-8), a nation unique in first being called and coming to the Lord, then rejected as it rejected Him after many years, and then by contract, by covenant, restored to find a series of Gentile warriors making war, only to be delivered in all of this, also uniquely. God is at work. His friends admire it. It is both pitiful and merciful, pure and determined (cf. SMR Ch. 9).

PREDICTABLE COMPLEXITY and PERPLEXITY

Such complexity is predictable when something (Israel) at odds with God, to the point of having been NATIONALLY guilty (with ROME!) of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and not yet repentant (it is more important when the victim is the Lord on sacrificial task for sinners), is NEVERTHELESS by divine promise to be preserved! It rumbles more still, when increasing numbers of presumptuous nations seek to divest Israel of even more land, as if to allow its enemies to emulate the Gaza case and act to exterminate it still more closely, and to give this to the Islamic vast display of territories, including the annihilatorily-disposed Iran! It becomes yet worse when allegedly pacific and irenic peoples, become vociferous on the need of having THEIR WEIGHT added to the local distressers of Israel, in order to have as a result, the militant Islamic powers supplemented by many other nations, in their divestment program for Israel.

It is not only complex; it is competing with the Mafia for a maelstrom.

Yet God has spoken that He will preserve this nation, and the blandishments of those who allegedly seek the same, but try continually to lessen Israel in its ludicrously small provision amid Islamic powers, are scarcely in line with this. Indeed, in Zechariah 12, which predicts from 500 years or so before Christ was crucified that Israel in large measure would one day repent, amid war situations, of the killing of their Messiah, we learn a vitally important fact.

It is this. The nations which concern themselves with Israel, as if it were their issue for intervention or direction, they will find it a 'burdensome stone'. It will tend to crush their endeavours and strain their backs!

It has happened, of course, precisely as prescribed and prophesied; but in such cases as the Madrid Quartet, what could you EXPECT, when justice and the word of God alike are adverse to these interferences, and to their direction! Indeed, all of these four have been involved in no small amount of strife of one sort of another.

God has given a commandment concerning Israel: that this people will not CEASE right up to the return of Jesus Christ who, having suffered, returns this time to rule as foretold in detail from 3000 years ago (cf. SMR Ch. 9). In a way, it has a modern mini-parallel in General MacArthur, thrown out of the Philippines, returning to command.

Meanwhile, among the nations plotting and forgetting, impelling and impulsive, recidivist in some cases and to what is good repulsive, makers of their own morals, giving mandates to man as if God: there is increasing torment of heart, or conscience, of body or finance, of arms and armies. Power play is immense and intense; and it is not at all playful.

A rare and remarkable thing is happening. We have the combination of the dedicated and bankrupt materialists with their fallen empire^*3 and the aspiring inspirationists, who have their brave new world to battle into existence, in the face of God and man alike. There are those like Obama (cf. The Uncomprehending Darkness and the Self-Revealing Light Ch. 7), statedly believing in what is the monstrous intellectual fraud of evolutionism and practising various incompatible ideas in unison, together with a neo-Romanism, confirming unabashedly the opposite of Christ in its brazen new extreme evolutionism^*4, to which Romanist religion Blair as Middle East envoy is now attached. We have for this motley assemblage, a nation, Israel, also in its own unique way, still at odds with the Lord, seemingly a prey for all, though it be not called that, and some marauders do not think of it in that way.

Thus it is that it faces its election as militant (and some virtually annihilatory) Islamic hordes devise means of exit for it! It is not a simple situation, but quite simple to the Lord who for thousands of years has indicated the problem to come and the outcome alike!

Those who follow His prophetic word, as Peter indicated, have indeed a light in a dark place (II Peter 1:19). It is needed!

What however of the nations, seeking to add their weight in contriving the ... administration of Israel, to that of its enemies, whatever their other intentions.

It is just when you have ambitions for someone else's child, and plan this and that for him, in this case Israel, you are rather likely to find some opposition from the father of that child, however rebellious the same. When the secular child (as in Hosea 11) is Israel, and the Father (in the sense of the ultimate Maker and historical director) is God, then the situation becomes an intensive one between God and evil, good ideas in man's estimation and truth in God's knowledge. The outcome is not in doubt, but is like a physics experiment in the lab - possessed of powerful items and notable results!

Contrary to implicit popular opinion (at least among the mighty, for many are those Christians who know better and otherwise), GOD IS NOT MOCKED. This does not mean that people do not try it on, but that such mockery flies off when applied, like sand from a fly-wheel, when poured on; and the grit gets into people's eyes. What would you! que voulez-vous! as the French so delightfully put it! How could it be otherwise ? what would you expect!

This world in so many of its aspirant powers with various ideals and deals in mind, and in some cases, comparative lack of them, is now forcing the issue. Not yet have the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, for that starts its consummative exercise with the resurrection, an event for which this author looks with a combination of yearning and gorgeous joy, for here lies the meaning of life, its incipience matured, its recipiency rewarded, its grace accorded. While however the many seek to replace the one kingdom, and the multitudes act as if the imitation of vultures were their culture (cf. Luke 17:37), the whirligig dust-cloud continues its pseudo-solemn rapacities, gloomy vivacities and inglorious accords.

Let us then in this milieu, turn to Israel's election.

It is intriguing because this being a nation AS SUCH still at war with God, who nevertheless has better intentions for it, as traced out from over 3000 years ago and often in the Bible since, and yet one having many divinely inculcated ideals which are to be found now in these hearts, now in those, there is room for conflict and variability. Again, some retain now this part of the biblical background and now that, like bits of a house after an explosion found, now here, now there: and now it has to put its vote where its heart is. But its heart is multi-directional, because of this disintegrative spiritual process which preceded it.

Hence in this election, there are many parties with VERY different aims. Some have some good points, others some others; some would almost combine, but the original prototype being rejected, in the word of the living God, the Bible, therefore the available combinations have tensions. On display with considerable vociferation is such an array of ideas and morals that tragedy, the comic and the perplexing alike, seem to shrug their shoulders in the midst of the mêlée!

What then ? The state of the election in the State of Israel has a solution to its apparently complex puzzle. It comes from the same source as the renegacy disposed of, and need requires.

DYNAMIC DETAILS

Will Kadima, which unsuccessfully sought to remove the Palestine entanglement in the form of releasing Gaza (the entanglement rather grew), a seemingly centrist body, link with Netanyahu, who does not want a Palestinian State, or with Liebermann who thinks of ceding predominantly Arab bits of Israel and gaining parts of the West Bank in return, those where Israeli settlers are, and who is unimpressed with Arab-Israeli calls for internal sabotage! This at least is what it seems to amount to, when Israeli-Arab citizens openly speak of making war from within! Will it be such an unlikely looking link as this, or will it be a different one ?

Will instead, Lieberman and Netanyahu, both of whose parties saw large increase, especially the latter – though the talk might make you even think the former had the larger rise – men who used to work together, the former the latter’s chief of Staff when the PM post was that of Netanyahu – will these work together ? for they have a strong mutuality in principle, it would seem.

Would Labour moderate or mediate and join them ? It seems not, as the post of Opposition seems now to appeal to a Party which lost heavily in this election. Would Shas, in its religious fervour, enter so that the moderation might not be merely secular ?

While the possibilities are almost like a series of ways to assemble a jig-saw puzzle made specially to be multi-solution, or with none, as the case might be, they do show one thing quite clearly.

Israel’s actual DISINTEGRATION in ethics and approach and perspective comes from its DEPARTURE from the Lord. Thus the biblical mandate to BE in the land has not the power of God to sustain it entirely, since it, as a State, has not returned to Him. He does protect it, but He also chastens it, and it is like someone meant to be a doctor, who insists on being a butcher. In some things, it looks alike, but in others the gulf is great.

It does not quite work out at the top level; and how could it, since the rightful President, the Lord, the true King and Prince, Jesus Christ, being decommissioned at the national level, the residue has fragments, extreme or distorted here and there, which simply do not fit FOR THAT REASON.

Here in an hour of Israel’s extreme emergency, with Iran bombastically talking if not of bombing Israel into non-existence, since that might be too atmospherically dangerous for that nearby State itself! then at least of being some kind of a factor in achieving its non-existence, somehow: what is left ? Politically, it is an investiture of variety, a cornucopia of bits.

This is one of the means by which, it would seem, the Lord may be bringing Israel to a recognition of something it needs to know and to realise in the heart: that without God there IS no solution, and without the Lord's Christ there is no access to God, His Father who sent Him (Isaiah 48:16) and without doubt the date of His death is around 30 A.D. and not tomorrow! (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4, with Mini-Messages with Maxi-Point Ch. 10). Similarly, the Arabs need to learn, those of Islamic fervour and sharing something at least of Iran’s thought, that you need to kill God WITHOUT resurrection in order to delete Israel. It cannot be done.

Nothing can be done while those at war with God, from two directions, one as a wife divorced and another as seeking to wound that wife, engage in desultory wars with each other. Nor is the situation helped by the presence of Romanism, where the current pope recently restored a priest who was not only a Lefebvrist, but one who had sought to discount the 6-7 million Jews slain in World War II to something like 300,000 and had an inkling to blot out gas chambers. To be sure, he has since made it clear such views must go if the priest is to function, but it is to say no more, an oddity extraordinaire that the realisation that such was the view of such a priest at such a time of restoration, should have … escaped the mind of the pontiff.

That simply puts three parties, all at war with the word of God (cf. SMR pp. 1032ff.), into religious juxtaposition. It is asking a lot of the Middle East, to contain them. It is not so very big …

In the end, God has intentions known for some 4000 years regarding Jew and the land, and those who contend and contest are only asking to be wounded. In the end, it is not the power of the Jew but of God which is overwhelming (cf. Deuteronomy 32:36), and those who wish to contest the matter to the end, as far as this earth is concerned in this Age, will end as Ezekiel advises us (cf. SMR Appendix A). If in the end, they insist on going, then they must go. It is God Himself who will act. The end of the drama is very different from the beginning, as is not uncommon in any disease that does not first itself die...

You cannot ‘run’ God. His grace, mercy, righteousness, faithfulness and lovingkindness make some think Him effete, like a rash, raucous, growing adolescent, under-estimating the grace and kindness of his mother. However the atrocious concept of mature man judging immature 'god' is the acme of illusion and the primacy of irrationality.

When such mistaken original concepts are applied to rediscovering His will, or to remaking it by a few artful devices and wrigglings: what then ? These might deceive man, but never God! (cf. Ancient Words and Modern Events Ch. 9, SMR pp. 100ff., *30 and *31, Barbs ... 6 -7).

When Israel is faced with even MORE intense nests of horror than currently confront it, when its power is gone, as in Deuteronomy 32:36, it is then that the LORD will act and whether Iran has this or that, it will do nothing to help her, if her current mind is fulfilled, and her current President pursues his foolish course. Not much better can be said for others who in interminable folly, such as that shown in the Madrid Quartet, presume to give directions to God as if He had never recorded His word and will, and had not in recent years fulfilled it so often and dramatically and reliably and in such detail, that one would hope, were it possible, that even the blind would see.

NOTES

See for example:

Victory ... Ch. 4 , Red Alert Ch. 10, Israel ... 1, Galloping Events ... Ch. 4, GGEPI,
CALL 10, 11, SMR pp. 502ff., Journey to God Ch. 6 , News 34, Red Heart ... Ch. 3

The BAY. 18 and 19.