The Re-Engrafted Olive
The
sight of a Jew - and where in all the earth do we not
behold a Jew? - ought to move a Gentile heart to its depths. For in every Jew we see a dead branch of the
oldest life-stock in the world, that once throbbed, and
shall yet throb again, close to the heart of God. In every Jew we behold a walking sepulchre of
privilege. The synagogue and its ruins
are God's object-lesson for the church: "for if God
spared not the natural branches, neither will He spare
thee" (Rom. 11:
21). In every Jew we see a soul
whom it is more natural to save than it is a Gentile. "Thou " - the Gentile - "wast
grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree." Every Jew should remind us of the living
miracle of our salvation; that the marvel of the ages is not the salvation of
the Jew, but my salvation, a hopeless, Godless sinner of the Gentiles. No peculiar love rested on any but Jewish 'fathers'; none but Jewish hands have offered
sacrifices to God since the first paschal lamb; no knowledge of Jehovah for two
thousand years saturated any but Jewish hearts: and yet I am saved, and
he is lost. "Branches were broken off, THAT I MIGHT BE GRAFTED IN."
All
Europe witnessed in 1907 a profoundly
suggestive drama. Two congresses sat
side by side at the Hague; a congress of
Gentiles, representing forty-seven nations, and a congress of Jews, gathered
from all lands ; the Gentile congress to restore peace
to the earth, and the Hebrew congress to restore the Jew to the Holy Land. Among
all the forty-seven nations there was not one solitary Jew; for peace to the Jew does
not enter into Gentile dreams; and the originator of the Peace Congress was the
Tsar Nicholas II., under whom, perhaps, more Jewish blood has been shed than under
any sovereign since the fall of Jerusalem.
The incident is singularly dramatic and impressive.
The
great bulk of Israel
- the Broken Branches have, for two thousand years, been found amongst
(so-called) Christian nations. Why? Because the Jew has been lifted up before the eyes of Christendom
as a perpetual warning of Divine severity. "Behold" - says the Holy
Ghost - "the severity of God." It has been severity indeed. Hear the wail of
the Jew himself, as voiced by a French
Rabbi of the sixteenth century. He
cries:- "To which part
of the world shall I turn to find healing for my wound? Among the riches and enjoyments of happy Asia I find myself a heavy-laden pilgrim. In sunburnt Africa,
rich with gold, I am a wretched, starving exile. And thou Europe,
my hell upon earth, what shall I say of thee?
It is the lot of every creature to experience change; but with Israel
it is not so; his misfortune never changes, his sorrow never ends."! Another witness, Kunz - a famous Jew - says:- "If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of
all the nations; if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they
are born ennoble, the Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a
literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what
shall we say to a national tragedy lasting 1300 years, in which the poets and
the actors are also the heroes? Now look
at the severity a little more in detail.” ‘Beginning from Jerusalem’: for as the mercy, so the severity, begins at the Holy City. During the siege of Jerusalem,
by Titus, more than a million Jews perished: those who survived - something
like 900,000 - were sold into all lands as slaves, many thousands being sold
into Egypt
to work in the mines and quarries. In
every city through which Titus passed, on his triumphal return to Rome,
hundreds of Jewish youths were compelled, in public shows, to fight with one
another, or with wild beasts, until death; and his triumphal car, in Rome
itself was drawn by 700 selected youths of Israel. The holy vessels of the Temple,
the golden candlestick, the table of the shewbread
and the sacred roll of the law were carried away to Rome: the vessels which once, as Uzzah found, it was death to touch, and before which whole
nations trembled, Jehovah had withdrawn for ever. Judea itself was made into little better than
a wilderness: at the yearly market, by Abraham's Oak at Hebron, a Jewish slave
fetched no more than the price of a horse: and, perhaps worst of all, a temple
to Jupiter arose on Mount Moriah itself, and Jews
were forbidden on pain of death to come within sight of the Holy City. It is computed that two-thirds of the nation
were thus cut off: so terribly were our Lord's words fulfilled, - "He sent his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned
their city "
(Matt. 22: 7). Dr. Gaster says: "I went
through the pass near Beyrout, called the Naar-el-kelb, the 'dog river,' because the mouth of the
river looks like the head of a dog. On
the side of one of these mountains you find inscriptions of all the invaders
who passed through Palestine
- Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Napoleon. If you close
your eyes, and listen to the waters, it is as if you could hear the wailing of
our people."
"BEHOLD
THE SEVERITY OF GOD!"
We
turn to the Middle Ages: but how impossible to do more
than touch upon the mediaeval sufferings of Israel! A badge of shame was placed upon them; in
some lands it was a wheel-shaped patch of red or yellow or many-coloured cloth,
worn on the breast; in others, it was a square patch fixed on the shoulder or
hat; in others it was a T, or truncated cross.
They were confined, like caged beasts, to a Ghetto, the gates of which
were shut every night. Every land shared, sooner or later,
in Jew-baiting, in crushing Israel;
there is no soil that has not been stained with Jewish blood. In France 100,000 Jews were exiled at a day's
notice, with only the clothes they wore, and one day's provisions; in
Switzerland all the Jews on the shores of the Lake of Geneva were burnt alive;
in York, England, of a community of 500 not one remained alive - all were
massacred - and 16,000 were banished from British shores; in Germany, at
Strasbourg 2,O00 souls, the entire Jewish community, were dragged to an immense
scaffold, which was then set on fire; in Spain, in the first year of the
Inquisition alone, 2,000 Jews were burnt, and ultimately 400,000 were exiled;
in Poland 6,000 perished in a day. And
all this befell the Jews, not as rioters, or revolutionists, or as a social peril,
but as Jews: throughout the Middle
Ages their morality and peaceableness is never
impeached, yet as Jews they were given to the gibbet and
the stake. "BEHOLD THE SEVERITY OF GOD!"
Finally,
it is startling to observe that to-day, as for the last nineteen centuries,
God's anger - in the words of the Psalmist - still 'smokes'
against Israel. Remembering that half Israel is in Russia, hear this cry of only six
years ago. The late Chief Rabbi, Dr.
Adler, received this letter from a well-known rabbi in Russia:- "By the blood of
20,000 who have been slain, and of 100,000 who have been wounded and who are
hovering between life and death, and by the cry of millions of Jews who have
been left helpless, homeless, and in danger of death by starvation, and by our
bitter cries for our Holy Torah, we call unto you 'Chiefs of the Jews,
kind-hearted as you are, messengers of Providence. For you have the power to rescue the remnant
of the children of Israel
from murder, destruction and utter ruin.
You have the power to say to the Destroying Angel, 'Stay
thy hand.’"
“The patients I found in hospital," Mr. Samuel Wilkinson says, "after the massacre of 1903, were mostly suffering from head
wounds inflicted by rough tools in peasant hands; a great number on this
occasion were suffering from bullet-wounds, and the wounds in most cases were
made by the regulation bullet of the Russian Army."
In Roumania a great tract of country has recently
been ablaze, and Jews assaulted and their homesteads destroyed: for the first
time the masses of the Roumanian peasantry have been
successfully stirred up against the Jewish population. From Podul-lloiae,
in Roumania, Jews sent the following telegram to the
King:- "With profound
grief we implore, the mercy of your Majesty to save our lives. A peaceful and quiet population has suddenly
been reduced to extreme poverty by bands of devastators organized by
instigators. Our property has been
destroyed and our lives are in danger."
On
these fresh outbursts Lord Rosebery wrote :- "Humanity stands appalled by the latest and darkest phase of
the long, terrible story of Jewish persecution. For it is, perhaps, in Great Britain alone of all the countries of Europe, that the Jews meet with loyal and equal
treatment. Elsewhere they are but tolerated, or lampooned, or degraded, or
massacred." "BEHOLD"- before our eyes
to-day - "THE SEVERITY OF GOD!"
But why such severity? The answer is extremely simple. God said it would happen, if they rejected
Him: and it happened. "By their unbelief
they were broken off." The
depth of the suffering is some slight guage of the
enormity of the sin. Israel cannot
explain how God, in the short seventy years' eclipse in Babylon, gave so
brilliant a constellation of prophecy - Daniel, Ezekiel, Zechariah - while yet,
in a nearly two-thousand-year night of hopeless exile, no prophet has been
given to Israel, since the grave of Him who wept over Jerusalem was sealed. "But it shall
come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, that
all these curses shall come upon thee. And
among these nations shalt thou find no ease, and there shall be no rest for the
sole of thy foot: but the Lord shall give thee there A TREMBLING HEART, AND
FAILING OF EYES, AND PINING OF SOUL, AND THY LIFE SHALL HANG IN DOUBT BEFORE
THEE; AND THOU SHALT FEAR NIGHT AND DAY, and shalt have none assurance of
thy life: in the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning!"
(Deut. 28: 15, 65-67).
Nevertheless
we Gentiles are but temporarily engrafted branches. "Some of the
branches were broken off, and thou, being a wild olive, wast
grafted in among them; glory not over the branches."
The life-stock is Israel. All ancient revelation reached the world
through Jews; the Root Himself, when He appeared, was a Jew; the Oil of the
Olive flowed out into all lands from the upper room of a Jew; and the
salvation of the world awaits the re-engrafted branches of the Jew. "Some of the
branches were broken off"; but some were not, for God's Olive is an
imperishable evergreen: so today, a Christian, as Lord Beaconsfield said, is a
completed Jew; and a converted Jew is only a branch restored to its own
life-stock. "For if thou wast cut out of that
which is by nature a wild olive tree, and was grafted contrary to nature into a
good olive tree: HOW MUCH MORE SHALL THESE, WHICH ARE THE NATURAL BRANCHES,
BE GRAFTED INTO THEIR OWN OLIVE TREE?"
So
the Broken Branches are to be restored to the Olive Tree at last. O the depth of the wisdom which can exalt a
Gentile over a Jew, and yet so as to humble him for ever; and the depth of the
knowledge - which knew how, out of the fall of earth's best, to bring salvation
to earth's worst! In every Jew we see
the great mercy of God. He is the dead
branch into whose wounded socket I was planted. "As ye
[Gentiles] in time past were disobedient to God, but
now have obtained mercy by their disobedience, even so
have these also now been disobedient, THAT BY THE MERCY SHOWN TO YOU THEY
ALSO MAY NOW OBTAIN MERCY." Amazing truth! it is
in the wounds inflicted by sin that God plants the
blessings of Heaven. The rushing river
of mercy, finding in its path an immovable rock, only flows off into other
lands to make still wealthier reservoirs of blessing. So at last, from the infidel
or apostate Gentile, mercy flows back to Israel. "As touching the
Gospel they are enemies for your sake: but as touching the election, they are
beloved for the fathers' sake. AND SO
ALL ISRAEL
SHALL BE SAVED.” For God
has made Israel
the pivot of the salvation of the world. Whatever happens to the Jew brings blessing to
the world. "For if the casting away of them" - the
breaking off of the branches - "is the reconciling
of the world, what shall the receiving of them be"
- the re-engrafting of the broken branches - "but LIFE
FROM THE DEAD?" As
out of the coffin of the Pharisee sprang the life of the Gentile, so out of the
faith of the Ghetto will spring the First Resurrection and the Kingdom. Well may the devout Jew pray (as he does)
daily;- "I believe with
a perfect faith, in the coming Messiah, and I will wait for Him."
Meanwhile,
is not Israel's
plight enough to melt a heart of stone? It is judgment righteously incurred: yet is
that not just the spot in which the prodigal is met? O the pathos of lost Israel! "Thus saith the
Lord, there is none to plead thy cause, that thou mayest be bound up: all thy lovers have forgotten thee;
they seek thee not: it is Zion,
whom no man seeketh after" (Jer. 30: 13). A
hardening but a hardening only "IN PART" - hath befallen Israel. A Jew in Dusseldorf was attracted to a
meeting by the singing. It happened to
be a Christian gathering on behalf of Jews; and when the Jew saw a whole
Christian assembly on its knees in prayer for Israel the truth came home to his
heart "That day," he says - revealing
the fact for the first time thirty-six years after - "was a Damascus day to me." One hour's prayer for Israel had
changed an Israelite's life for eternity.
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No portents now their foes
amaze,
Forsaken Israel wanders
lone;
Their fathers would not know Thy
ways,
And Thou hast left them to their
own.
“But O, when stoops on Judah's path,
In shade or storm, the frequent
night,
Be Thou - long-suffering, slow
to wrath –
A burning
and a shining light.”