The State of Israel – God’s 4,000 Year Old Successful Start-Up!

My recent trip to Israel coincided with the 60th anniversary of Israel’s statehood. In the scope of the number of years that God’s chosen have lived in the land, 60 years is a blip. But what a 60-year span it has been — a successful re-start that we can study to see God’s hand at work. Our Jewish cousins, upon whose Biblical foundation we stand, have succeeded in reclaiming a land, a people, and a dream.

It was great to celebrate the miraculous convergence of events and courage that resulted in the declaration of Israel’s statehood in 1948. The pioneers who came to the new state from the dispersion around the world even before statehood were persistent in the most difficult circumstances, buying land from Turkey that everyone thought was worthless and making it bloom. The hardy hopeful who were trying to create agriculture on top of limestone and desert had such physical and engineering challenges that we can hardly imagine them. The ink had not dried on their declaration of statehood before folk were taking up arms against them.

Over the last sixty years a testament to the sheer determination of free people has happened in the land of Israel. Only this country, in the history of all countries, has been able to successfully integrate millions of folk who did not know the language, arrived with nothing, and had limited future prospects because they had fled for their lives to reach their homeland. Many were highly educated, but poor. Some were secular, Jewish in heritage but not religion, some were tied to Jewish religious tradition through generations, some were Arabs who lived in the area declared to be Israel and who still live there – citizens in exactly the same way their Jewish neighbors are citizens. So many were coming, coming in waves, rescued, airlifted, willing to suffer passage in boats too small – it was an amazing migration. None of the effort really mattered to them – they were all coming home, going “up to Jerusalem.”

They had survived the worst that mankind could throw at other human beings. While almost the entire world sat in deadly silence they died in the Holocaust. When the world waked up and came to their assistance a generation of Europe’s fine Jewish heritage had perished. Every Christian owes every Jewish person an apology for the depth of suffering supported by our sins of omission. We all need to look at their subsequent “resurrection” as a nation and thank God for His mercy, His provision, and His grace. The Western world’s laws, religious heritage, culture, flowed out of their history into our daily lives.

Guest Blog by: Mary Margaret Gibson
Read more from Mary Margaret on her blog The Gospel @ Work