[A NOTE ABOUT THIS ARTICLE: God is amazingly precise in all He does. He coordinates times & seasons & words & scriptures. This comes from a presentation by Jonathan Cahn. You will be blown away!]
God’s Amazing Timing
This is part of the amazing story of God’s restoration of Israel. It begins with the words of Moses to his people. He was warning them of the consequences of disobedience to God’s Law. “Moreover, the LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other end of the earth; and there you shall serve other gods, wood and stone, which you or your fathers have not known.” (Deuteronomy 28:64) (NASB) And so it came to pass. Through Moses again, God had made a promise to gather the Jews back to the Land in the Last Days, when they come to Him with all their heart. “The Lord your God will bring you back from captivity, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the nations where the Lord your God has scattered you.” (Deuteronomy 30:3) (NKJV)

Now it just so happens that in September of 1867, Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain visited the Holy Land. He was a famous skeptic, who once wrote: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” He took quite the dim view of the offerings of what would be Israel, eventually publishing his impressions in a book that made him famous, called, Innocents Abroad. In one passage he wrote: “Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince… Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.”[i] He called it “desolate and unlovely.” His descriptive disdain seemed to have no limits. “There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”[ii] There are many such entries. Twain was not impressed. But what’s amazing, is NOT what Twain wrote but what the scriptures said about him. This is from the Torah portion that was read on Mark Twain’s very last day in Jerusalem. The passage is dealing with the judgement the Lord would mete out when Israel turned from their God. “so that the coming generation of your children who rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from a far land, would say, when they see the plagues of that land and the sicknesses which the Lord has laid on it: ‘The whole land is brimstone, salt, and burning; it is not sown, nor does it bear, nor does any grass grow there, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in His anger and His wrath.’ All nations would say, ‘Why has the Lord done so to this land? What does the heat of this great anger mean?’ Then people would say: ‘Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which He made with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt; for they went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods that they did not know and that He had not given to them.” (Deuteronomy 29:22-26)[iii]
And then there is the fact that Twain’s last day in Palestine, as it was then called, was a Sabbath and therefore had an assigned scripture to be read throughout the world. It included the phrase, “Lord have mercy, hear our prayer.” As it turns out, even his real name, Samuel Clemens points to the prophetic. Samuel means, ‘The Lord has heard.’ And Clemons means ‘and has been merciful.’ Now, all of this is just the setup.
In the Old Testament there is something called the Jubilee. And it actually has continued into the present day. It happens every 50 years. As it turns out 1867 was a Jubilee Year. Count 50 years forward and we get to 1917, the next Jubilee Year in that cycle. The Jubilee was a big deal. It was a time of restoration. Labor contracts were deemed satisfied. Slaves were released, debt forgiven. And most importantly for our purposes here, property was returned to its original and rightful owners. That which was lost is to be found. This was a picture of redemption and forgiveness. It was also the year of the promise of the return of the Land to its owners, to the Jews, to what would become modern Israel. Israel had been under control of the Muslim Ottoman Empire for centuries. But in 1917, Great Britain, who had been fighting the Turks (Ottomans) in World War I declared that there would be a Jewish homeland in Palestine, through something called The Balfour Declaration.
But there is something quite amazing in that declaration that proves that God had His hand in it. By 1917 the British were quite sure that they would gain control of the Middle East following the end of the war. Now HH Asquith had been Prime Minister and he was against the establishment of a Jewish State. However, his government collapsed in December of 1916 bringing Lloyd George to power. He brought with him Arthur Balfour as Foreign Secretary and both were in favor of a Jewish presence in Palestine. Lloyd George was raised on the Bible and Balfour was an on-fire born again Christian. So on November 2, 1917, in a letter addressed to Lord Rothschild, a leading voice in Britain’s Jewish community, the government committed itself to working toward the establishment of a Jewish homeland. The letter read in part: “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” Now Jonathan Cahn gives us the significance of the timing of that event. Now, it is custom, that each week has an assigned reading from the Torah, or the first five books of the Bible. Well, it so happens that on the sabbath before the week of the Balfour Declaration Genesis 12 was a part of the Torah portion. In the Tanach, the Hebrew Scriptures, in Genesis 12:7, it reads: “And the Lord appeared to Abram, and He said, ‘To your seed I will give this land,’ and there he built an altar to the Lord, Who had appeared to him.” So the Torah portion was declaring what would happen that very next week. And the first land that was claimed for Abraham was Beersheba – and it just so happens that the first land Britain took from the Ottoman Empire in that region was Beersheba. They did so at the Battle of Beersheba, which occurred on October 31, 1917, the very day that the cabinet approved the Balfour Declaration! The Sabbath portion for that week contained the words: “Therefore he called that place Beersheba, because the two of them swore an oath there.” (Genesis 21:31)[iv]
In his book, The Oracle, Jonathan Cahn points out that there is a prophecy in the Book of Haggai that proclaims a blessing. “Consider now from this day forward, from the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month….But from this day I will bless you. (Haggai 2:18) This is God, through the Prophet, declaring the lifting of the curse. In that year of Jubilee, the 24th day of the ninth month was December 9, 1917. It was the day that Jerusalem was liberated. In the early morning hours of December 9th, two cooks from the British Army were in search of eggs when they were approached by “four policemen, several youths, the Jerusalem mayor” and an American photographer anxious to surrender the city. British forces had just made this possible by defeating the Turks in and around the city the night before.[v] But it was after sundown, so the new Hebrew day had begun. Now look at Haggai 2:22. “I will overthrow the throne of kingdoms; I will destroy the strength of the Gentile kingdoms.” That is exactly what happened here! The Ottoman Empire lost its control of Palestine.[vi] And the British General who took the city was Field Marshall Allenby, another born again Chrisitan.
We’ve been talking about Jubilees and in Leviticus 25:10 we find a short explanation of what happens in those years. “…and you shall return every man unto his possession, and you shall return every man unto his family.” “The words “you shall return” in Leviticus 25:10 is spelled Taw Shin Beth Vav which is tashuvu.” In Hebrew, numbers are expressed through letters. The Hebrew word for ‘you shall return’ is Tashuvu. It designates the number 5,708 on the Hebrew calendar. That translates to 1948 on the modern Western calendar, the very year Israel came back into existence as a nation. They had returned.[vii] Israel came back into existence on the Sabbath, so there was a word appointed for that day. Amos 9:11 was a portion of that assigned word. “On that day I will raise up the fallen shelter of David.” (And thus it was done.)
If 1917 was a Jubilee year, what was the next Jubilee year? That would be 1967. And it was in 1967 during the 6-Day War that Israel took control again of their eternal capital of Jerusalem. Fifty years! Another Jubilee! This was a war Israel did not want. But the USSR had told the surrounding Arab states that Israel was getting ready to attack them. The Arabs outnumbered and outgunned the Israelis by a huge margin. The Israelis were preparing coffins and dedicating cemeteries. The Cabinet held an emergency meeting. Again, there was a word from the Torah for that day. “Go to war.” And so they did, capturing Jerusalem and returning to the Western Wall for the first time since the days of Rome.

Jump forward now 50 years to 2017, the next Jubilee year. It is in that year that the United States recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In taking that action, President Trump followed the template of the ancient King Cyrus. It happened in the first year of Trump’s ascension to power and after a 70 year period of prophetic fulfillment. Cyrus ordered the rebuilding of Jerusalem after 70 years of Jewish exile in Babylon. President Trump’s action came 70 years after the UN voted Israel into existence in 1947. The UN declaration came on the 7th day of Kislev in 1947. Seventy biblical years to the day later takes us to December 6, 2017 the day Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the Capital. That action opened the floodgates to more prophetic / biblical fulfillments. The nations do indeed rage and are gathering up against Jerusalem – just as the scriptures foretold.
So it was that over the many centuries God had kept His people intact, even through their state of scattered exile. By the early 20th century He had prepared the way for their complete return and possession of the Land that He had given them in perpetuity. This was an amazing and varied lot; European Jews, Middle Eastern Jews, Jews from India and China and Africa. God was calling His people home. And it was all according to prophecy. All according to His unwavering Word!
Israel’s rebirth was a magnificent work of the Almighty. Scattered throughout the earth, language lost. But maintained their identity in exile. As JC points out, the word preceded the reality. Built on a prophecy. The language reborn before the nation reformed. The anthem written in anticipation of its need. The national mindset forming before the national boundaries. Cahn calls it a resurrection; a return to the fully-developed nation that would come.
[i] Tuly Weisz, Mark Twain’s unwittingly prophetic vision for the State of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, September 23, 2017
[ii] Chen Malul, Mark Twain in Palestine – “A Hopeless, Dreary, Heart-Broken Land”, https://blog.nli.org.il/en/mark-twain-in-palestine/,
May 11, 2018
[iii] Jonathan Cahn, The Oracle, Front Line, Charisma Media / Charisma House Book Group, 2019, Chapter 11
[iv] Jonathan Cahn, The Oracle, Front Line, Charisma Media / Charisma House Book Group, 2019, Chapters 19 & 20
[v]AVIVA AND SHMUEL BAR-AM, When the British captured the Holy Land, The Times of Israel, December 5, 2015
[vi] Jonathan Cahn, The Oracle, Front Line, Charisma Media / Charisma House Book Group, 2019, Chapter 23
[vii] Hebrew Wordd Study- “you shall return”, Chaim Ben Torah, September 27, 2024
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