Shabbat Sabbath

The term “Jew” (Yehudi, Judahite) has a range of meaning. First, it may refer to the patriarch named Judah. Second, it may refer to his literal descendants. Third, it may refer to the tribe, which included many non-Jews who joined the tribe and converted to Judaism (Esther 8:17).

The term “Israelite” also has a range of meaning. First, it may refer to one who is descended from the man named Israel. Most of the time, however, it simply refers to the nation of Israel, which included more than just descendants of Jacob-Israel. Israel was not a tribe as such, but included all of the tribes as a whole until the era of the Divided Kingdom, when the term Israel was distinguished from Judah and included only ten of the tribes.

The context of Scripture usually tells us which meaning is applicable, whether genealogical, national, legal, or religious.

The story of Israel is not complete without an understanding of its incremental restoration. In fact, the main controversy centers on the question of how Israel’s restoration is being fulfilled today at the end of the age.

Most Christians believe that the Jewish state fulfills this prophecy, because they have assumed that the Jews are Israel. Most Jews, however, know that they are not the Israelites of prophecy, because, they had prayed for thousands of years to be reunited with the House of Israel—that is, the ten tribes that were seemingly lost in Assyria. Yet in 1948, when they established their state, they chose to call their nation Israel, rejecting other names that had been proposed, such as Judah and the Kingdom of Judah.

In other words, they adopted a form of Replacement Theology, where Judah essentially replaced Israel as the inheritors of the promise. Most Christians, by this time, had forgotten the difference between Israel and Judah.

We have already presented six chapters of this book of the prophecy of Zechariah, and we hope to have fully established that Zechariah was a Christian prophet in many scriptural aspects. First, he prophesied the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem as a type for the rebuilding of the house of God in His people Israel, which is the ultimate purpose of the 70-weeks Kingdom in Judaea. Then, his prophecy uses the first high priest of that rebuilt temple, Jeshua, or Joshua, as a type for Yahshua Christ, the coming Messiah who would be the ultimate high priest of His people. Furthermore, he used Zerubbabel, the first governor of Jerusalem as it was going to be rebuilt, as a type for Christ as Governor over His people. The seven-branched candlestick of Zechariah’s vision was a prophecy foreshadowing the messages to the seven Christian assemblies of the Revelation, and the vision of the two witnesses, or olive trees, which feed their oil to those candlesticks informs us that those assemblies consist of the people of the houses of Israel and Judah. The very purpose of the 70-weeks Kingdom was to achieve the reconciliation of Yahweh God with Israel, and all of these circumstances in its founding were employed by the prophet as allegories representing that purpose, which was ultimately fulfilled in Christ.

In the last segment of this presentation of the prophecy of Zechariah, we left off part way through chapter 8. The theme of that segment, which began with Zechariah chapter 7, we identified as Sin and Punishment. We are calling this segment Scattering and Gathering. In the Biblical context, the two concepts cannot be separated from one another. A major underlying theme of all the Biblical prophets, which is often expressed in very explicit terms, is the scattering of Israel in punishment for their sin, and the gathering of Israel in mercy and reconciliation. Yahweh did not scatter Israel without a purpose, and He promised to gather Israel explicitly and exclusively. By the time of the prophet Zechariah, the scattering of Israel was an accomplished fact. But even before the scattering was accomplished, through the more ancient prophets Yahweh had set forth these exclusive plans by which He would both reconcile Himself to Israel, and gather them together once again (at least allegorically), while at the same time the promises to the patriarchs in relation to the destiny of their seed would be fulfilled. This plan is illustrated in prophecy as early as the books of Moses, so it was a part of Yahweh’s Law and it is His Divine Will for Israel from the very beginning. This is the entire purpose of God set forth in Scripture, and there is no other purpose for the coming of Christ outside of this purpose.

A congressional Democrat stated that a Bible verse declaring that God forms unborn human life inside the womb actually supports abortion-on-demand before voting against a law that would protect newborn children from the threat of infanticide. 

During debate over the “Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection” Act, Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-Mich.) invoked Jeremiah 1:5 — which says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” — on the House floor Wednesday afternoon to oppose the bill.

The Biden administration condemned Israel for giving $39 million in Palestinian Authority tax revenues to the victims of terrorism instead of the terrorists.

“It is morally just and important for the war against terror. There is no greater justice than using the funds for the victims of terror,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said of the move.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price condemned Israel’s actions as a “unilateral response” that will “exacerbate tensions,” and warned that the administration will raise the issue with Israel.

In the New Testament part of the Bible, there are two letters written by Paul to the disciples of Jesus who were living in the Greek city of Corinth during the First Century.

There were factions among the believers there, and Paul, who was at the center of these factions, wrote about the difference between the natural intellect of the worldly system, and spiritual wisdom that comes from God in his first letter to the believers living in Corinth.

Cultures as diverse as the Chinese, Babylonians, Peruvians, Swedes, and North Africans all have ancient legends of dragons. Where did these legends come from? And how did such different and geographically diverse peoples come up with the same stories?

Well, that’s a question we’ve been asking for years—and we don’t often see attempts to answer it! But recently I saw an article titled “The Mysterious Origin of Dragons.” This article explored why and how “these magnificent creatures squirm[ed] and soar[ed] their way into our imaginations and mythology” and concluded that “ancient” people in the past must have…

The world is in the middle of a new technology arms race, according to best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari, who warns that the prize being fought over this time is not physical territory, but our brains. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Harari predicted a future where governments and corporations will be able to gather enough data about citizens around the world that, when combined with computational power, will let them completely predict – and manipulate – our decisions. Harari calls this concept “brain-hacking”. Harari painted the grim picture of a future only a few decades away, in which big tech, or governments, “or whoever”, could know about everybody’s medical conditions and personal life histories. In other words, they could know us better than we know ourselves. That’s even before you throw in emerging technologies like neural interfaces that could allow real-life mind reading…

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists. As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place? It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but a few years ago physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes. “Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system,” said Tobar. “However, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts the existence of time loops or time travel – where an event can be both in the past and future of itself – theoretically turning the study of dynamics on its head.” What the calculations show is that space-time can potentially adapt itself to avoid paradoxes. To use a topical example…

After 813 years, the second-oldest English-speaking university has reinvented itself as an institution devoted to un-learning. Users of the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary awoke this week to find that the dictionary had added strange definitions of “man” and “woman” to appease transgender ideologues.

In addition to “an adult female human being,” Cambridge University now defines “woman” as “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.” In addition to “an adult male human being,” Cambridge now defines “man” as “an adult who lives and identifies as male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”

Fox News recently reported that a recent study examining the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns on church attendance in the U.S. has revealed that the pandemic “resulted in an overall depression of religious participation” as approximately a third of Americans have stopped attending religious services. (Source.)

They invited Franklin Graham, the president of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Association, on to their show to explain why this is happening.

Graham stated that it was not enough to just identify with Christ, but one had to follow him and live for him.