Amos 9:14-15 reads, “I will bring back the captives of My people Israel; they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink wine from them; they shall also make gardens and eat fruit from them. I will plant them in their land, and no longer shall they be pulled up from the land I have given them, says the Lord your God.”
The point Amos makes for us is crucial to understanding the prophetic timeline of the last days. Though Amos was a contemporary of Hosea and Isaiah, we know that what Amos wrote in chapter 9 of his prophecy does not pertain to the return of the Jewish captives from Babylon to Jerusalem. We know this because what he describes did not happen. The Jews did return from their Babylonian captivity; they did build the waste cities, plant vineyards and gardens, and eat and drink from them. But they were “pulled up” from the land for nearly 2,000 years. This reveals that Amos’s prophecy was not fully fulfilled in the past. Therefore, the complete fulfillment is yet future.
We are living in the days when this is being fulfilled. The national people group with the ethnic identity, language, heritage, and history of the Biblical Jews are now back in the land, and this has begun the fulfillment of what Amos wrote. This means no matter how various world governments and the UN may try to uproot Israel from the land, God Himself will not allow that to happen. The reason this is crucial to the prophetic timeline is that the promise is specific to an identifiable people group who are the second most significant figures in Scripture, the Jews.
If the Jews weren’t to return from being scattered amongst the nations, and they weren’t brought back into the same geographic region of the world in which Jerusalem is located, then God would not have kept His promises to them, and that would be catastrophic for us all!
For those who claim that modern Israel is not Biblical Israel, I would ask: Then why is everything written about Biblical Israel by the prophets happening to the modern state of Israel? Why is the world gathered against her? Why are there efforts to divide the city of Jerusalem? Why is the city a burdensome stone to all the nations?
The fact is, Israel’s existence today confirms the fulfillment of prophecies that tell us God’s prophetic clock is moving toward its foretold end. Israel is the timepiece by which last-days events can be measured.
Gabriel told Daniel there is coming a seven-year period for his people and Jerusalem that is yet unfulfilled. It requires the Jews to be a national people group, that they be in Israel, and that they have possession of all of Jerusalem. All these things have taken place within the span of a single generation, and that generation is coming to an end. “How long is a generation?” is a popular question, and there are several answers people have come up with, but the truth is we don’t know. What we do know is that there is only one generation, and the same way that the fig tree will bud and bear fruit within the same season, so too will Israel.
