THE HOPE OF ISRAEL - The Preterist Archive

The Hope of Israel: What Is It? 57
present to their vanquished and enslaved posterity, on their final
departure from it. Ere they themselves had entered it as
enemies, he describes those enemies by whom their descendants
were to be subjugated and dispossessed; though they were to
arise from a very distant region, and though they did not appear
till after a millenary and a half of years 'The Lord shall bring
:
a nation against thee from far, from the end of the earth, as
swift as the eagle flieth; a nation of fierce countenance, which
shall not regard the person of the old, nor show favor to the
young' etc. (quoting Deut. 28:49-52).
"Each particular of this prophecy has met its full completion.
The remote situation of the Romans, the rapidity of their
march, the very emblem of their arms, their unknown language
and warlike appearance, the indiscriminate cruelty they manifested
toward old and young, could not have been represented
in more descriptive terms. The Roman generals, Vespasian,
Adrian and Julius Severus, removed with parts of their armies
from Britain to Palestine, the extreme points of the Roman
world."
And this writer proceeds to show, as many other
commentators have done, how, point by point, in the
minutest detail, the judgments executed by the Eomans
in the years 66-70 of our era, were predescribed by
Moses.
Now the matter of chief interest for our present purposes
is that, from this national destruction by the
And in this, the
Romans there was to be no recovery.
prophecy of Moses is in full accord with that of Jesus
Christ, recorded in Matthew XXIV and Luke XXI. For
Moses said: "God will rejoice over you to destroy you,
and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked
from off the land whither thou goest to possess And
it.
the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from one
end of the earth even to the other" (Deut. 28:63, 64).
This, according to this prophecy, was to be the end of
their history as a nation.
Nor is there any promise of God, by any later prophet,
of recovery for the earthly nation from this final destruction
and dispersion at the hands of the Romans.