Your People Shall Be My People by Don Finto

Author:Don Finto [Finto, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012110, REL006140
ISBN: 9781441229847
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

8

Return to the Land

Who are these that fly along like clouds, like doves to their nests?

Isaiah 60:8

I will take the Israelites out of the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land. I will make them one nation in the land.

Ezekiel 37:21–22

It must have been a strange sight. We did not look like gardeners. Yet there we were, about twenty of us, standing on a rather barren hillside outside the city of Jerusalem, spades in one hand, tiny tree seedlings in the other. We set about digging holes in the ground, where we placed the plants, then packed the earth tightly around them before giving them a drink. Each tree honored someone we loved. For every tree planted, we paid ten dollars to the government of Israel.

Suddenly the whole scene struck some of us as hilarious. After paying the price of the tour, we were now paying additional money for the privilege of planting trees—trees that neither we nor the people being honored were likely ever to see again. What a chamber of commerce this Israeli government has! What other nation has ever conceived of such a revenue-producing plan?

But this nation is different; no other can compare. The title deed to their property was signed by the Almighty Himself. Israel was to be considered the “center of the nations” (Ezekiel 5:5). In fact, “when the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel” (Deuteronomy 32:8 KJV). We may be working on that one for a while, but that’s what the Book says!

The psalmist calls Israel “the people close to his [God’s] heart” (Psalm 148:14). “To your descendants I give this land,” God promised Abraham (Genesis 15:18), then “signed” a covenant of blood (see Genesis 15:1–20). “To you and your descendants I will give all these lands and will confirm the oath I swore to your father Abraham,” the Lord later restated to Isaac (26:3). And to Jacob, after changing his name to Israel, He said, “The land I gave to Abraham and Isaac I also give to you, and I will give this land to your descendants after you” (35:12).

“This land”? Which land? The Lord was amazingly precise in defining its borders and boundaries: “From the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” was His word to Abraham (Genesis 15:18). To the conquering Joshua, four hundred years later, He further clarified: “Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates—all the Hittite country—to the Great Sea on the west” (Joshua 1:4).

The extent of God’s land promise is shocking for today’s readers. How can it ever be possible that Israel will extend all the way to the Euphrates? Can it be that all or parts of Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Iran will one day belong

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