If you have already reviewed the three prophetic calendars, you will probably wonder just how they might be related to Israel's history in a way that could show the prophetic nature of God's dealings with that nation. How can Israel's historic record, developed in the REDEMPTIVE PLAN portion of OLIVE TREE STUDIES, be displayed in a way that will cause the prophetic events to stand out? Since there are so many dates and time periods in that historic record given in the Bible, a scheme is needed to both summarize the entire record, and then show the effect of overlaying the Levitical, Jubilee, and 360 Day prophetic calendars on it.

Israel's Redemptive Timeline is intended to do just that, and it will additionally provide a perspective on Bible prophecy that could not be seen by studying individual calendars alone. In fact, it is this perspective that will enable a logical transition to be made from Bible times to the 20th Century.

Let’s review and summarize some of the facts learned from the REDEMPTIVE PLAN, where well known Bible events were related to secular history and dated. That demonstrated that the Bible can be treated as an historical document even though its primary purpose is obviously spiritual and prophetic. Those well known Bible characters were real live people who probably acted in ways just as we might have, under similar circumstances. Some faced problems not too different from our own as they dealt with people and circumstances in their ancient world. They were driven by the same human desires as we, but those who emerged with God’s stamp of approval strove to walk with Him.

That many Bible events and dates can be specified to such a high degree of accuracy may come as a surprise to many who have read through the dates provided in the REDEMPTIVE PLAN. It is not generally realized that so many Bible scholars and archaeologists have devoted much of their lives to develop this kind of detail and that we can be the beneficiaries of their work with only a little perseverance on our own.

The chief aim of this present section of COMING GLORY will be to demonstrate that those dates and time periods developed in the REDEMPTIVE PLAN are not only correct, but that they also reveal an historical pattern for Israel that has important prophetic features even into the 20th century.

If you have reviewed those portions of COMING GLORY dealing with with the Levitical and Jubilee Calendars, it will have become clear that God's prophetic Plan is closely related to both. However, there are many more events in both the Old and New Testaments that also provide vital inputs into the prophetic mosaic even though they may not be directly highlighted by key Levitical or Jubilee dates. Instead, their value is found in their "relative" times of occurrence with respect to each other. The existence of certain time patterns within Israel's history is the reason for this portion of the study.

Here are illustrations of the differences between "absolute" and "relative" ways of approaching the timing of events.

You and a friend want to meet at a nearby restaurant for lunch. You are both free next Wednesday so you agree to meet at the restaurant at 12:15 PM. You have just set an "absolute" date for your luncheon engagement. This is similar to the way the Bible has set absolute Levitical dates for the Old and New Testaments' sacrifice of the "Lamb" (Passover), or the beginning of physical and spiritual "harvests" like First Fruits, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. Other absolute Jubilee years were set for the birth of Jacob, Israel's entrance into the Promised Land, the start of David's kingdom, and the birth of Messiah.

Alternatively, you and a friend want to meet for lunch; you have free time next week but he or she has a busy schedule. Since your friend's schedule is tight, you suggest that he or she simply call you when able to leave home for the restaurant. Now you know the driving time from your friend's house to the restaurant, so all you need is a telephone call to figure your own departure time so as to simultaneously arrive for the luncheon engagement. In this case, you have made an arrangement with your friend based on "relative" time, since no actual date has been preset.

The second example also has application to the study of Bible prophecy, for in many cases the relative timing of concordant Bible events with respect to each other is much more significant than their absolute times of occurrence. Consider the following hypothetical example:

Suppose it were discovered that Moses' ministry during the giving of the Law in the Old Testament was preceded and followed by a set of major events whose relative timing was exactly the same as a second set of major Bible events that preceded and followed Jesus' ministry in the New Testament? Suppose in addition that both sets of events were also found concordant with the respective ministries of those two individuals? The absolute dates on which those events actually occurred would not necessarily be vital, but those similar patterns would certainly be intriguing, because they would imply that God was somehow at work in both cases, carrying out His prophetic Plan for Israel. In fact, such a circumstance would undoubtedly cause a keen observer to carefully study both of those unfolding parallel patterns of events to determine their full implications for His Chosen People.

Now this "hypothetical example" just posed is really an actual fact, and it may be seen when Bible history is carefully chronicled and displayed in Israel's Redemptive Timeline shown below. However two adjustments must be made from a typical single column chronological listing of those events and dates before these time patterns will become evident.

1. First, the usual chronological arrangement would likely be a single list of Biblical events and dates starting with the Patriarchs back in the Book of Genesis, then proceeding chronologically through the remainder of the Old Testament, Intertestament, and New Testament periods. Conversely, the prophetic time patterns just spoken of are best seen by first breaking the chronological listing into two columns instead of one, with the break occurring at the 931/930 BC advent of Israel's Divided Kingdom in the Old Testament following Solomon. In this way, all of the Bible history following that time can be placed in a second column parallel to the earlier one. Consequently, any time patterns in that chronological listing from the Patriarchs to the Divided Kingdom may be compared side by side with any similar patterns in the chronological listing from the Divided Kingdom through the remainder of the Old and New Testaments.

2. Second, all of the time periods between the events and dates following the Babylonian Exile after the Jews had returned back to the Promised Land must be highlighted with a 360 Day calendar instead of the usual 365¼ day one appropriate for our Gregorian year.
   
   This second alteration will probably strike you as patently absurd if you have not yet studied the way in which the 70 year period of the Babylonian Exile was measured, or Daniel's "70 Weeks" following that Exile. However, a review of those time periods will certify that the 360 Day calendar is the correct one to explain events following the Exile on into New Testament times.

When these two adjustments are applied, it is possible to construct the following Timeline for Israel's entire Biblical history. Notice how the time patterns surrounding Moses and Jesus are the same. Also observe that there is a similarity in the time patterns having to do with the Babylonian and Roman destructions of Jerusalem. In fact, look at the overall patterns between the two columns in terms of the major blocks of time within Israel's history. They seem to have a repeatable characteristic over much of Israel's history, at least as far as the column on the right is carried through the destruction of Jerusalem in the first century. If you wish to review all of the key dates for each of the periods from the REDEMPTIVE PLAN, just click on the headings for each of the major periods.

The above Timeline prompts another question. If the column on the right were continued past AD 70, would there be found any additional time patterns in Israel's history pertinent to the centuries that followed? If such patterns exist, when should they be expected? In order to make such questions meaningful, two things must be recognized.

• First, one of the three prophetic calendars, i.e. Levitical, Jubilee, or 360 Day, must be chosen to overlay on the extended timeline. Here, the obvious choice is the Jubilee calendar, since only it is governed by the Solar year, capable of spanning long periods of time. Moreover, it has already been proven to work over the 2000 year period from Jacob's birth till Messiah's birth during Bible times.

• Second, there would be no point in overlaying the Jubilee calendar on any historic timeline unless the nation of Israel was once more in existence in the Land during the time. Of course, that didn't happen until 1948, so the 20th century is the earliest possible occasion for a meaningful result.

Since the Jubilee calendar repeats every 50 years, it is easy to extend it to the 20th century as follows.

The final Jubilee year identified for Bible times was the birth of Messiah in 7/6 BC, so

7/6 BC + 50 years = AD 44/45
(remember that we must subtract one year in adding a BC and AD year)

AD 44/45 + 1900 years = 1944/45

Therefore, the first Jubilee year in the 20th century should have been 1944/45, and the second one should have been 50 years later in 1994/95.

This indication that 1944/45 and 1994/95 were Jubilee years does not in itself signify the fulfillment of prophetic events, for there have been a lot of Jubilees since Biblical times. However, a 1994/95 Jubilee near the close of the 20th century would have some unique properties.

• It would be the first one after Israel was put back into the Promised Land in 1948.

• It would be exactly 60 Jubilees following David's kingdom, and 40 Jubilees following the birth of Jesus, numbers that suggest (1) the completion of man's attempts to bring about peace on earth through his government, and (2) the end of Israel's testing during the period of the Church Age, before God once again would begin a new economy with His chosen people.

• It would be the Jubilee that concludes a thousand year cycle in God's Levitical system of counting since the birth of Messiah, making it the Jubilee year for the commencement of the new Millennium.

Therefore, there would seem to be no better time for the occasion of God's direct intervention into the affairs of men, than during that final 1944/45 to 1994/95 Jubilee interval, when He might prepare Israel and the world for the COMING GLORY of that new Millennial age. Consequently, that final 50 year span leading up to Jubilee 1994/95 becomes a prime candidate to examine for the occurrence of prophetic events using the three prophetic calendars discussed previously.

With this motivating expectation, we are eager to extend Israel's Redemptive Timeline to this same time frame, so that it will be possible to examine its potential prophetic qualities.

Notice initially that this extended timeline causes the Age of the Gentiles, while Israel was out of the Land, to correspond in some way with the period of the Judges in the Old Testament. Notice also that the State of Israel's creation in the latter half of the 20th century followed soon after Jubilee year 1944/45, and comes into juxtaposition with the initial phases of the Old Testament kingdom. This makes Israel's rebirth and subsequent history worth a closer look.

History records that the Jews began their Exodus out of Europe in 1945, following their intense persecution during the Holocaust in World War II. There was great opposition from nations in the Middle East and some European powers concerning their future homeland in Palestine, so the United Nations formed shortly after World War II, took the issue under consideration and proposed a partitioning of that Land into Palestinian and Jewish sectors. The Jews accepted the U.N. partitioning, declaring their portion to be the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, however the Arabs remained adamantly opposed to the existence of Israel's newly conceived nation.

The State of Israel began with a representative form of government, appearing to have no connection with Bible prophecy, being conceived by the choice of the returning Jews, with no discernible intervention from God. Following Israel's declaration of sovereignty, the newly formed State of Israel was surprisingly able to defeat their neighboring Arab enemies who possessed vastly superior military forces in their 1948/49 war for independence. Remarkably, Israel continued to prevail over her enemies in a series of four more wars with neighboring Arab nations that eventually brought under their control the entire region west of the Jordan River, the Golan Heights to the east, and for a time the Sinai Peninsula.

Then in 1987, a Palestinian "Intafada" broke out. When PLO Chairman, Yassir Arafat, announced his "Peace Initiative" for the resolution of the Palestinian problem in December, 1988, the question of Israel's rights to the whole Land was elevated to an international issue. From that time, questions about Israel's proper allotment of the Land and even their existence in the Land has become the subject of much debate among the Gentile nations, and within Israel itself.

Thus, 1988 began a time of great strife and political division within the State of Israel. Although, the issues still remain unresolved, a new Likud government in Israel, elected by popular vote in the spring of 1996, has resisted a core provision of a 1993 Israeli/Palestinian Peace Accord to trade occupied areas of the West Bank for peace.

You will have noticed that the Jubilee calendar carries with it a one year ambiguity. If you have reviewed the portion of OLIVE TREE STUDIES titled REDEMPTIVE PLAN, you may recall that this stems from the fact that Edwin Thiele, upon whose work the Old Testament Bible chronology is based, could not resolve the precise year when the Old Testament Divided Kingdom actually began, it being dependent on the elapsed time between Solomon's death, and the commencement of the rebellion that brought about that division. Unfortunately, that vagueness has been propagated through many of the ensuing historical dates, including the dates for the Jubilee calendar.

This fact has posed no serious problem while dealing with ancient times 2000 or more years ago, because the results are still quite adequate. However, when we move to modern times where we have very precise secular dates for events in the world, a one year uncertainty becomes troublesome. In particular, if 1944 was the Jubilee year, it would fail to typify the historic situation regarding the Jews. In 1944, they were still suffering in Hitler's concentration camps at the very height of the Holocaust, and the prophetic implications of the Jubilee as a time of release, freedom, new starts, and new opportunities, would not have fit the circumstances. Alternatively, if the Jubilee year was 1945, that year would most certainly have correctly typified the meaning of the Jubilee, as the time when Jews would be set free from their bondage, and allowed to begin their return to their rightful inheritance.

History records that World War II ended on September 1, 1945, shortly before the day of Atonement which would have officially begun a Jubilee year, if 1945 was it. Jews who had been set free from their oppressors the previous spring began returning to the Land of their promised inheritance. The ensuing 20th century "Exodus" roughly followed the pattern of that Old Testament Exodus out of Egypt when God delivered them from Pharaoh. There was even an epic 1950's film named "Exodus" featuring Paul Newman, and portraying the story of European Jews struggling to return to Palestine following World War II. Thus, the historic events following the fall of 1945 would have provided at least a physical fulfillment of the provisions of the Jubilee, if it were actually found to be the correct year.

Fortunately, Israel's Redemptive Timeline (Extended), can provide a key piece of evidence to help resolve this dilemma, by carefully examining its alignment with Israel's Old Testament kingdom. If the State of Israel now in the Land is actually fulfilling the provisions of God's prophetic Plan to usher in Messiah's Millennial reign, and to fulfill His Old Testament promises to Israel, we might well expect to discern a pattern in 20th century Israel's history similar to the one that brought about that Old Testament kingdom. The expectation of such a pattern might reasonably be expected for several reasons.

1. Israel's Redemptive Timeline over its previous Biblical history of 2000 years evidenced a repeatable pattern just before the introduction of a new phase in God's prophetic Plan involving the first coming of Messiah with a new Covenant of Grace.

2. The End Times should again represent a brief time span leading up to another new phase in God's prophetic Plan, this time culminating with the second coming of Messiah and a new Kingdom Covenant back to Israel, preparing them for His Millennial Kingdom.

3. The Davidic kingdom as depicted in the Old Testament side of the Timeline clearly has prophetic overtones, by virtue of the many prophecies like the following one, declaring David's historical kingdom to be prototypical of Messiah's future Kingdom.

The timetable that brought about Israel's Davidic kingdom was well documented in the United Kingdom portion of the REDEMPTIVE PLAN, and the following text provides even greater detail, allowing any subliminal pattern that might exist to be precisely matched with the State of Israel's 20th century history.

Therefore, it is possible to match the two time periods quite precisely in the following chart.

The result is both expected and shocking. The expected result shows that the State of Israel did in fact track the pattern of Israel's Old Testament kingdom in broad terms, i.e. there were 40 year intervals, and 7½ year intervals in both. However, an unexpected result also emerges. If the final seven years of that 20th century pattern were measured according to a 360 Day calendar, the resulting time pattern would have ended at the advent of Tabernacles, 1995. This would mean that the final seven years would be timed by the same 360 Day calendar used to count the first "69 Weeks" of Daniel's prophecy ending when Messiah first presented Himself as the King on Palm Sunday. The pattern's conclusion at the advent of Tabernacles cannot be overlooked, because Tabernacles prophetically represents the one Levitical harvest time when the Gentile nations remaining on earth during the Millennium are commanded to go up to Jerusalem to worship King Messiah. Furthermore, if 1995 was the Jubilee year, the result would then conform with the views of many rabbis and Christian theologians alike who have studied End Time prophecy, and concluded that the "70th Week" of Daniel should end in a Jubilee year.

The net result of all of this is that the State of Israel was created on the precise date to not only reproduce the timeline for the Davidic kingdom, but additionally to enable the incorporation of a seven year period having the properties of Daniel's "70th Week", and ending in a Jubilee year at the advent of Tabernacles, which is stated in the Bible to be singularly connected to the next Millennium. It is hard to imagine how a set of time periods and Levitical dates could become enmeshed in a way that could be more indicative of the End Times.

The results just set down will undoubtedly prompt more questions than they will provide answers, particularly in light of the grave situation in the world following 1995. Still, Israel's Redemptive Timeline has provided several valuable insights.

• It has provided a useful way to display Israel's history by showing its overall prophetic properties with respect to God's prophetic Plan.

• It has provided a way to resolve the one year ambiguity in the Jubilee calendar, showing that 1945 and 1995 must have been the two Jubilee years during the 20th century.

• It has identified an overall time slot from 1945 to 1995 that is highlighted by obvious prophetic markings, and must therefore become the chief focus of investigation in the final 20th Century Timeline portion of COMING GLORY.

• It has created, but not resolved, a rather unexpected issue pertaining to the timing of Daniel's "70th Week" that needs to be examined in more detail later.

COMING GLORY

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