Restoration With the church caught up out of the earth into the glory to be forever with the Lord, God has still a people upon the earth for whom He has a plan different from His purpose for the church. That people is Israel. What of the Jews? What is their destiny? What becomes of them at the age-end? What is their history from the time the Lord comes again to this world? In answer, let us note a few facts concerning them. Observe, first, their— DISPERSION, One of the greatest of the Roman historians writing of the tragic events coupled with the siege of Jerusalem by Titus, says that before the city fell a great light was seen in the temple of the Jews and voices were heard in the night crying out, "Let us depart." This, said the historian, was taken by the Romans as an omen that the gods of the Jews had deserted them to their fate. That which a heathen annalist took as a superstitious sign has in very truth become a solemn reality. The glory of God departed from the Jewish people with the downfall of their fated city. The words of the weeping Christ were solemnly fulfilled, "Behold your house is left unto you desolate." The legend of the wandering Jew has become a pathetic fact in their saddened and blighted national life. Scattered from one end of the earth to the other, like the chaff of the summer threshing floor, there is left to them no temple, no sacrifice, no glory. Scoffed at, persecuted, despised, forsaken of God for the time, they stand today a melancholy proof of the inspiration of the Word of God and of the solemn and assured certainty of the judgments which He pronounces upon all sin and rebelliousness in His people. PRESERVATION. "Give me a proof of the Bible in a word" said a great emperor to his godly chaplain. "Sire, the Jew," was the quick reply. And that is a great truth. The preservation of the Jew is a veritable miracle of God. Consider for a moment this remarkable fact. A man lands from a foreign land upon our shores. His children are educated in our schools: they imbibe the spirit of our institutions: they fall naturally into our customs and habits. In a few years they are entirely merged with our own people. Their own nationality has disappeared. Their fathers and mothers are Greeks, Italians, French, Germans. But they themselves are Americans only, with scarcely a trace left of the nationality from which they |