Do NOT Despair!

Do NOT despair, for any reason! 


If, from an earthly perspective, any person or any people throughout all of human history should have just cause for despair, it should have been the Jews, God's chosen people. Secular and religious history traces them as the oldest continuous God-fearing and God-loving culture that has not been destroyed. While everyone living today traces from Adam, through Noah's family, and to our present, it is only the Jews that have directly wrestled, Jacob-like, with the living God of Creation, through good times and bad, to be resurrected again and again as a nation, even as they stand among all the nations today. They have been and continue to be the chosen people of God, disciplined, healed, and sustained by God Himself. The Bible is loaded with their stories of success and failure, victories and defeats, their lordship over other nations and their enslavement and dispersal. Yet, they remain a force with which to be reckoned, for God has proven repeatedly that He is for them and with them.

Throughout their history the Jews have had amazing times of personal and communal elation, as well as brutally crushing defeats that lasted for many centuries. Over and over again, they have struggled to learn what God wants them to learn and to be the example to the rest of the world that He desires them to be. From their humble beginnings, when Abram was called out of Ur of the Chaldees, through the times of the superlative Solomon, on to the kings and divisions in Israel, through their centuries of long decline and repeated dispersal and regathering, until the Romans finally scattered them to the four winds, they have known trials and tribulation. 

Many over the eons believed the prophecies that told of their eventual final regathering. Yet, it still shocked the world at the end of World War II, when the nation of Israel was reborn out of the ashes of so much vileness that accompanied that war. Millions of their people had been slaughtered in German death camps. Millions more were enslaved and died in Soviet work camps, like so many Gentiles whom Stalin hated. Yet, many of the Jews embraced the prophetic promise and went back to the Promised Land that God had assigned to Abraham thousands of years earlier. If you doubt the Bible as the Word of God, just look at His eons of promises to the Jews and look as Israel, today, occupying their land once again, even as God promised and fulfilled. Never doubt that He keeps His promises. 

The Jews could have given up on God and His Promises. Some did. They could have remained in their surroundings and allowed themselves to be wholly entwined with the cultures in which they found themselves. Some did. But, many of them who survived WWII opted to put their faith into practice. Believing God's promises, they returned to the Promised Land. They could have forgotten God's promises and hope, but they didn't. And, believing, they received the gift of His Promise, partially fulfilled. Today, they reap the ongoing trials and fruit of those promises, and move on in faith toward the final chapters of human history.

The Jews have been part of world history for a very long time and are not going to go away, because God says so. And, with God's promise of their continuing presence, throughout the ages, from Genesis 3:15 through the Old Testament, and on to the very end of Revelation, God has repeatedly offered His promises of salvation, hope, joy, and peace to the Jews, and to the rest of us, if we all will simply choose God's Word and salvation that He promised to Adam and to Abraham, trusting in Him and His Savior, no matter how good or bad earthly life is for us, or about us. We need to learn from the eons of trials that the Jews have faced and overcome. We need to learn to accept God's ways and His timetable, and still thank and trust Him through every hardship, blessing, and victory. As Jesus said during His ministry on Earth, to all who will decide to trust Him,

¹  Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.

²  In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
³  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.    John 14:1-3

Now consider God's promises to the Jews, hundreds of years before Jesus walked the Earth, promises that overflow to any and all of us who wish to be a part of God's plan of hope, peace, and salvation, to those of us who will deliberately choose His salvation for ourselves, which comes first in our hearts and minds, not through worldly strife, cleverness, or religiosity.

Isaiah 61:1-11
¹ The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
²  To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn;
³  To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified.
⁴

 And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations.
⁵  And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of the alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers.
⁶  But ye shall be named the Priests of the LORD: men shall call you the Ministers of our God: ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory shall ye boast yourselves.
⁷  For your shame ye shall have double; and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion: therefore in their land they shall possess the double: everlasting joy shall be unto them.
⁸  For I the LORD love judgment, I hate robbery for burnt offering; and I will direct their work in truth, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them.
⁹  And their seed shall be known among the Gentiles, and their offspring among the people: all that see them shall acknowledge them, that they are the seed which the LORD hath blessed.    
¹⁰  I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.
¹¹  For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord GOD will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations. 

If you wish to know more about how to be sure you are saved from your sin, and secure in God's Christ, on your way to heaven, God's Simple Plan of Salvation can help you sort out your questions. 

Once you have made your eternal decision, contact the nearest independent fundamental Baptist or Bible church that uses the King James Bible. I've found that, overall, they stick closest to what God says... and why wouldn't people want to do their best to agree with and do what God says? Read your Bible and ask the pastor what he believes and why. Honest questions should bring honest answers. He will respect you for asking, if he's a godly man. That way you can compare what God is teaching you, as you read, with what that pastor and that church are teaching you. I do NOT recommend that anyone blindly follow any religion or group without comparing all of its tenets to what the Bible says, because God says the Bible is His only and final Word for us, our owner's manual, as it were. Therefore, be wise and diligent to seek after the LORD God and His Christ that you may find and know that you have eternal peace with Him, and are walking with Him continually. God bless you. If you trust Christ in His plan of salvation then I'll see you with Him in heaven one day. Feel free to let me know if or when you finally accept His salvation in Jesus Christ. You'll never regret trusting Him above all other things. I trusted Him March 15th, 1984 and have not had a dull moment since then. He will change your life for the better, IF YOU LET HIM.