What Time Is It on God's Calendar? Watch Jerusalem - By Barry Elkin -
In the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus is found God's giving of the Jubilee to the nation of Israel.
"And thou shalt number seven Sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven Sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family."
Every seventh year was a Sabbath year and after seven Sabbath years numbering forty-nine years in all, they were to proclaim the following year, the fiftieth year a jubilee.
One of the primary functions of the jubilee was to return every possession unto its original owner. The institution of the Jubilee Year became the means of fixing the price of real property and moreover, it excluded the possibility of selling any piece of land permanently.
In verse 23 God furnishes the motive:
"The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me."
And so the primary object of the jubilee was of course, the reversion of all hereditary property to the family which originally possessed it, and the reestablishment of the original arrangement regarding the division of the land.
Now, lest you think that the jubilee year is no longer of importance to God if not the nation of Israel, let me give you a fairly recent illustration.
In the New Testament in prophesying about the coming destruction of the Great Temple and the dispersion of the people Jesus said in Luke 21:24,
"And they 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 times of the Gentiles be fulfilled".
In accordance with this prophecy Jerusalem has been oppressed by one heathen power after another all down thru the centuries since Titus destroyed the Temple, took hundreds of thousands as slaves in 70 A.D.
Then in 131 A.D. after the Bar Kochba revolution Hadrian drove the Jews from Palestine in what is called the diaspora until its final Islamic ruler, The Ottoman Empire of the Turks.
In 1914 WW I began and God caused the Turks to make a deadly error in judgment having them side with Germany in WW I.
Few people are aware of the divine planning in the deliverance of Jerusalem and that it was so explicitly foretold by Isaiah about 2500 years earlier.
In Isaiah 31:5 he wrote, (Now read carefully the words that the Lord our God spoke thru the prophet).
"As birds flying, so will the LORD of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve it".
In December of 1917 the British Commander General Allenby and his army approached the city of Jerusalem held and strongly fortified by the Ottoman Turks.
A long and bloody battle was anticipated to wrest the city from the Turks with much damage being done to the city by the British shelling.
In order to gain information about the Turkish defenses he had two British airplanes fly in low at high speed to and fro, back and forth over the city.
This scared the Turks, many of whom had never seen an airplane and to their untrained ears the name of Allenby, the British commander took on the sound of "allah's bey" meaning god's will and so they fled their positions, surrendered the city to Allenby without firing a single shot nor was a single structure damaged.
Now there were a number of British air squadrons stationed in the Middle East at the time but a particular one was chosen to fly that mission.
In detailed fulfillment of Isaiah, the Number 14 bomber squadron of the Royal Flying Corps (Now the R.A.F.) took Jerusalem just as God had said,
"As birds flying they defended it, defending it they delivered it and passing over it, they preserved it"
That's a pretty good fulfillment of bible prophecy by itself but the part of this event that will really give you shivers just thinking about it is to be found in the motto of the bomber squadron chosen for the task.
A motto that was chosen two years earlier in 1915 when the squadrons were first formed. Inscribed on the shoulder patch and painted onto the side of each bi-plane were the words,
"I spread my wings and keep my promise."
When I first read this, though I do not doubt Our God in any way, it just seemed so incredible that I had to find out on my own whether this was actually true or the fanciful writing of someone wanting to put together a nice story for we believers to enjoy much later.
After all, you have to admit that that scripture coming together so many years later with that particular squadron with that particular motto on the planes that just happened to be chosen for that mission IS pretty incredible.
So with the now ease of using the computer as a tool of research I was after many attempts able to track down records of the 14th bomber squadron as part of the Royal Flying corps.
It no longer exists as such but is now a part of the RAF since the end of World War I but I was able to find a page of information on it including its insignia and its motto.
I wasn't that surprised to find that the insignia and motto bore out the original story but being able to locate it after all these years was pretty amazing but there was something more amazing that I discovered after examining it closely.
It was the source of the motto that was just as amazing as the entire story considering who it was that held the city when it was taken by the British.
As we all know now it was the Turks of the Ottoman Empire who were obviously Islamic and had as their holy book the Quran.
Here is what the squadron insignia looks like and what it says right in the center of the page. Look closely at the writing under the words RAF Lossiemouth:
Can you even believe that the motto is from the Arabic Quran? How ironic is that? WOW! Do we have an awesome God or what?
So the city was delivered from the Turks and fell back into the hands of Christian nations in 1917 but it was governed by the British and half of it was still held and controlled by the Arabs.
So what has that to do with the Jubilee years?
Well, that event occurred in 1917 and in the following year the Balfour Declaration was issued which declared its intent to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
As was previously shown, Israel became a nation when it had matured thirty years later in 1948 but she still had not acquired complete governance and control of Jerusalem. It was still a divided city.
Then, exactly FIFTY years later, after it's return from the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, in 1967 in a war not planned by Israel but most definitely by Our God, the Jews captured the Arab portion of Jerusalem and annexed it to keep and so in the Jubilee year of Jerusalem, the property of Israel reverted back to its original owner.
This has really gotten me wondering what may be in the works for this next jubilee of Jerusalem
Let's see; FIFTY added to 1967 is, ah.....2017.
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