The following was commentary on THIS article:
When the general boasts that the IDF is sufficient guarantee that the nation will “never again” suffer another Holocaust, it is nothing new. But surely there is a tragic prophetic irony to be detected when he unconsciously casts the ill-fated promise in the very language of scripture (“no weapon or intent formed against you will prosper”). Whether secular or religious, it is this deep humanism, by no means peculiar to Israel, that condemns the favored nation to another and another, simply because it is the object of God’s special election.
Isaiah shows that the source of Israel’s continued calamity lies in their failure to say that “there is no hope” (Isa 57:10). The eschatological metaphors of birth and resurrection find their fulfillment in one place only, “at the end of their power” (Deut 32:36; Ps 102:13, 17, 19-20; Dan 12:7). This is the message of Jacob’s trouble; and the church that does not know this principle for itself cannot be to Israel what it must in that hour or in any other. The great need of our time is for the church to know God as “the God who raises the dead,” since nothing less is required for barren wombs to give birth and for the dead to live and bear fruit unto God.
More than the content of creeds based on NT revelation, this is the root principle behind what Paul calls, “the mystery of the faith.” Many know the creed that do not know the mystery of the faith, and therefore the God of the faith. This was the basis of Jesus’ reprimand of Nicodemus. Not that Nicodemus had access to any particular verse that said a person must be born again, but it was expected this “teacher in Israel,” should have well observed that if a nation is moribund and dead apart from the regenerating Spirit of God, could it be any different for the individual? If a nation will born in a day at the end of an ultimate travail, and sprinkled with clean water at the end of a final desolation unto death, how can it be otherwise for the individual?
Whether for a nation or an individual, God is not truly known until He is experimentally known as “the God who raises the dead.’ As for the nation, so for the individual, the curse of the transgression must continue to threaten until the kingdom of God is made personal and experiential in true spiritual birth and resurrection. Whether it is created by the Word or by adversity, this kind of resurrection / spiritual birth comes only out of what we might call, ‘the crisis of the Word,’ since true and irreversible resurrection comes only at the end of power, the death of carnal confidence. Anything less or other is tragically “short of the glory of God.”
In this sense, Christ is the end (goal) of the law, because the law was given, not to strengthen humanism, but to destroy all hope and therefore all boasting. Christ is the end of the law, precisely because He is the revelation at the end of the veil, which is to say, the end of strength.
Therefore, the question of the modern state is not whether it is a miraculous fulfillment of prophecy. We would all say, “much every way!” The question is rather what will will it take to bring the final death stroke to the invincible resilience of humanism. More than any particular sin, God is at war with humanism. If He will not forever suffer it in His nation, He will not suffer it in His church. That is why judgment must begin at the house of God (1Pet 4:17).
