Isaiah 11:11-12 It shall come to pass in that day That the Lord shall set His hand again the second time to recover the remnant of His people who are left, From Assyria and Egypt, From Pathros and Cush, From Elam and Shinar, From Hamath and the islands of the sea. He will set up a banner for the nations, And will assemble the outcasts of Israel, And gather together the dispersed of Judah From the four corners of the earth.
Jeremiah 31:37 Thus saith the LORD; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the LORD.
Song of Solomon 2:4 He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.
In 70 AD Jerusalem finally fell to the mighty Roman army led by Titus after a long siege. To commemorate the Roman victory over the Jewish rebellion, an arch was erected in Rome known to this day as the Arch of Titus. This famous arch depicts the fall of the Temple and its artifacts paraded in a processional described by the historian Josephus’ in his account, “The Jewish War.”
The arch of Titus stands to this day, as a horrific monument to the defeat of the Jewish people. Yet history and God have a way of inverting such things since when the nation of Israel was reborn in 1948, the exact depiction of the Menorah on the arch of Titus was used as a symbol of Israel’s rebirth.
While the Roman empire has long been vanquished, the nation of Israel has remained and been resurrected despite utter defeat and decimation. How could this tiny nation survive 2,000 years of dispersion and persecution? A promise (Jeremiah 31) and a prophetic sign are indicated by this “banner to the nations” of Isaiah 11.
And just as the symbol of the menorah on the Roman victory arch has been resurrected to symbolize Israel’s rebirth, this little nation of Israel is also a banner and a sign for us. Israel is a monumental marker indicating our time in history (God’s story) and the absolute surety of God’s promises. Her resurrection signals the time of the end, the last of the Last Days, and the soon coming of Messiah for His Bride.
The Roman empire expressed terrible power and pretension with persecution and plunder, appearing victorious for a season. In these days of the final “Beast” system, the enemy of our souls is also marching, triumphantly corrupting culture and government and destroying righteous foundations. Persecution of God’s saints is increasing greatly, and we may need serious endurance. But we also have a “banner.” His banner over us is love, which endures all things and never fails.
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]This is one of my favorite promises in the Bible — that God turns mourning into dancing! He takes away the anguish of being clothed in sadness and replaces it with gladness. However, notice what God doesn’t do — simply stop your mourning and make it disappear. No, He transforms it…into joy!
As we discussed last week, the word for “sign” in ancient Hebrew is “oht”. It was used in Genesis to designate God’s covenant sign with Noah, (the rainbow). And we see now the same word again, in Exodus, identified with the deliverance of the Jewish people from the tenth plague, when the angel of death passed through all Egypt to strike the firstborn. Anyone under the “sign” of the blood was spared.
Yesterday we wrote about one of the greatest moves of God … the Moravian Revival. When the community was in complete disarray, Count Zinzendorf focused on how they could live together in love despite their differences. He called all the men together for an intense study of the Scriptures to focus on how Christian life in community was portrayed. These studies combined with intense prayer convinced many of the believers that they were called to live together in love and that their disunity and conflict were contrary to the clear calling of Scripture.
In the late 1800s, an awakening in South Africa led by Andrew Murray was a powerful move of God. Studying that revival yields essential insights concerning the events occurring now throughout the United States. As the spirit of God began to move in Cape Town, Murray compared the SA revival with past experiences of revivals in Europe. He decided that the intense “emotionalism” was a false experience of God and charged in to break up the meeting. Stepping out of the church, he encountered his father standing and weeping. His father rebuked Andrew, “How dare you stop something that I have prayed to happen for 30 years!”
Revivals, that is, genuine Divinely ordained seasons of the activity of God among men, have a universally unusual character. Normal activities and behaviors give way to the tangible influence of God’s Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brings a freedom of expression, emotion, conviction, worship, and other variations from normal experience.
During the Catholic inquisitions, as millions of Christians were being killed by the Jesuit Priests for apostasy, throughout Europe, Christians were fleeing. In Bohemia alone, there were an estimated 4,000,000 Christians before the Jesuit inquisition, and ten years later, only 800,000 people remained in Bohemia – all of whom were Catholic. These terrible events prepared the ground for one of the greatest moves of God that have ever been recorded, the Moravian Revival, which lasted for over 100 years. Gustav Warneck, the German Historian of Protestant Missions, testified, “This small church in twenty years called into being more missions than the whole Evangelical Church has done in two centuries.”
I love to study past revivals and in studying them, there are two recurring themes that stand out:
First, that He has often used obscure and unknown individuals to lead revivals, and that even these men whom He used so powerfully never considered themselves to be “special”, but often wanted to stay out of the limelight.