For Phillip Church (NZ Baptist, April 2012) to discard great chunks of the Old Testament scriptures as irrelevant because they are not referred to in the New Testament is like saying the Holocaust didn’t happen because it isn’t referred to in the New Testament. Undoubtedly Psalm 102:3 refers to it, for example, “For my days vanish like smoke, my bones burn like glowing embers.”

In the 1960s I was taught the prophecies about the return of the exiles were all fulfilled when they returned from Babylon. Then I came across Deuteronomy 30:3. It was the words “gather you again from all [not just Babylon] the nations where he scattered you.”

The word “again” means more than once and confirmed Isaiah 11:11-12, “The Lord will reach out a second time ... gather the exiles of Israel – he will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth.”

Babylonian exiles only came from the East. Those the Assyrians took into exile 722BC never returned until the 1880s when some came to escape pogroms in Russia. The trickle became a flood in the 1990s and by the year 2000 the one millionth person arrived. The verse says Israel and Judah – never before had the two returned to their ancient home land.

The Jews in AD70 lost their nationhood, their land and their language. But did they really lose their nationhood? Jeremiah 31:35-36, “only if the sun, moon and stars stop shining will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before us.”

But God raised up a man to modernise the Hebrew language and then on November 29, 1947 restored their nation and land. The proceedings at the UN took 30 minutes, the vote 3 minutes.

Isaiah 66:8: “Whoever heard of such a thing? Can a country be born in a day or a nation brought forth in a moment?”

Finally, Jeremiah 16:14-16 “The days are coming declares the Lord when men will say ‘as surely as the Lord lives who brought the Israelites up out of the land of the North and out of all the countries where he had banished them. I will restore them to the land I gave their forefathers.’” 

Today – right now – this is being fulfilled.

– Ross Abernethy
Auckland