Israel’s Harvest Season

Listen and hear My voice. Pay attention and hear what I say.
Isaiah 28:23-29

It really grieves me when anointed Christians cannot see the plain word of God in their Bibles about His love and commitment to the Jews and the restoration of Israel even spiritual restoration by faith through the ONLY Door that exists to any of us: the Door of Yeshua, Jesus.

I thank God that He let me in on that understanding early. That I didn’t have to wrestle with God over that question of His faithfulness to them I saw it in every page of Isaiah that I read in 1984 – and it was easy for me to receive because I didn’t have teaching against Israel in my earliest exposure to the Bible stories and to Jesus.

Others have come up in churches that taught ‘God is done with Israel!’ Always behind that statement is a conceited arrogance about how much better gentiles are than jews were. It is a poor grasp of history that can manage to believe that. But many do, and they aren’t all low IQ people who just don’t know any better either.

Many highly educated, theologian-class believers have educated themselves right out of the faith I saw and grasped hold of reading in the Bible of how God purposed not to let go of Israel, but faithfully restore them by faith.

There is a truth that Jesus told His followers in Acts 1:6-7. The truth is about WHEN, NOT IF God will restore the kingdom to Israel. Maybe it is better said, when will God restore Israel to the Kingdom. That’s what it really is about.

Israel’s Harvest Season continues

Acts 1:6-7 6 So when they came together, they asked Him, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”

7 Jesus replied, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority.

His reference to the times and seasons – when will the blindness be removed from the Jews? I ask, when will the blindness regarding the Jews be removed from Christians?

These things are “fixed by the Father’s own authority.” “Fixed” is tithēmi and it means “established, ordained, appointed.”

No one can change what God has fixed by His own authority. Martin Luther thought it was up to him; it wasn’t. Instead of becoming bitter about it, we have to do as Jesus also told His disciples, “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet.” Matthew 10:14

Culturally, shaking the dust off of one’s feet in first-century Jewish culture, was a dramatic, symbolic gesture rooted in traditions regarding ritual purity and hospitality.” It “was a physical declaration that they were leaving behind pagan defilement and did not want to pollute their homeland with foreign dirt.”

REMEMBER NOW: This is Jesus talking to His disciples and they are in Israel, so He is preaching to Jews. Jesus is speaking of His spiritual kingdom.

Whether it is Messianic Jews speaking to fellow Jews or whether it is Christians speaking to any unsaved person, Jew or Gentile, Yeshua’s instruction is to preach to those who are LISTENING and to those who refuse to listen, move on.

Shake the dust of their unbelief-pollution off of your feet and keep seeking out those who will listen.

If we practice this instead of harboring anger, resentment and bitterness toward those who cannot yet hear our message, we will truly be shaking off the dust of those encounters that we are not to carry forward with us in hope.

I am preaching to myself right now. Maybe you already got this, but I have let those resistant encounters with Christians who refuse to believe anything but ‘the Church replaced Israel’ make me angry. I think shrugging it off and moving on is like shaking the dust off our feet. Shrug it off and go forward in great expectation of those God has PREPARED to hear and receive because they are out there!

We are to preach God’s true and restorative intentions to anyone who will LISTEN.

The times and seasons for a great release of ability to see will come in God’s timing and authority. Don’t doubt it because the soil you are plowing is so hardened and unhearing. It will come. The Bible tells me so.

Spiritual realities behind spiritual harvesting. Not every one, not every nation gets harvested in the same way. Some are harder ground to plow. Some will take greater punishments when it is time to separate the wheat from the chaff in order to bring to harvest the useful part of the grains. One size fits all handling is not how the harvest is brought in.

Isaiah 28:23-29 Listen and hear my voice. Pay attention and hear what I say.

24 Does the plowman plow for planting every day? Does he continuously loosen and harrow the soil?

25 When he has leveled its surface, does he not sow caraway and scatter cumin? He plants wheat in rows and barley in plots, and rye within its border.

26 For his God instructs and teaches him properly.

27 Surely caraway is not threshed with a sledge, and the wheel of a cart is not rolled over the cumin. But caraway is beaten out with a stick, and cumin with a rod.

28 Grain for bread must be ground, but it is not endlessly threshed. Though the wheels of the cart roll over it, the horses do not crush it.

29 This also comes from the LORD of Hosts, who is wonderful in counsel and excellent in wisdom.