Joseph Farah - The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians, and the End of the Age

And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you: whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. ACTS 3:2021

ITS A FUNNY THING, the way the world tracks time.

Practically everyone knows what year it is right now.

Something very dramatic and life changing must have happened nearly 2020 years ago that made people take notice. It had to have been rather spectacular and amazing for all nations to adopt this new calendar.

Not surprisingly, there have been some feeble protests.

Notably, many in Israel keep track of what year it is in two ways one civic date and another religious.

North Korea, an isolated, totalitarian country led by a series of madmen who rule as if they are gods, build weapons of mass destruction, and starve their people, has repeatedly tried to persuade the rest of the world that time really began when the first of its dynasty of rulers, Kim Il-Sung, was born, April 15, 1912.

When the bloodthirsty, communist, revolutionary Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975, murdering millions in the process, the leadership declared it was the year 0, just as the French revolutionary leaders, in opposition to all religious influences, had declared 1792 Year 1.

Lets just say such efforts have been in vain.

Of course, most people know why the world marks time the way it does (though I note with horror that many Twitter users remarked on New Years Day 2014 that they believed it marked Americas 2,014th birthday!): Jesus, the Savior of the world, the Messiah, and the Son of God, came into the world and life was never the same again.

He came as a baby born of a virgin, fulfilling hundreds of Hebrew prophecies about the coming Redeemer. He lived approximately thirty-three years in Israel and never traveled beyond Egypt and what we call Syria or Lebanon and Jordan today. He taught that the Hebrew Scriptures were God-breathed, true, and valid.

Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, was crucified, rose after three days, ascended into heaven, and foretold that He would come again as a conquering King of kings, establishing an everlasting kingdom of pure justice, righteousness, and peace.

Since then, there have been efforts to portray Him as:

simply a great teacher who told magnificent parables

a lunatic who happened to be at the right place at the right time to captivate billions of followers

the leader of a group of Bronze Age peasants in a backwater called Israel

a magician or sorcerer

a misunderstood socialist and advocate for the poor and downtrodden

a revolutionary zealot

merely another in a long line of Hebrew prophets

A few even insist, despite the overwhelming and well-documented historical record, that He never really existed. They are without excuse, the Bible warns (Rom. 1:20).

Despite efforts to conceal the nature of His unique, calendar-changing life with the use of terms such as CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before the Common Era), everyone with any grasp of history knows it was Jesus who reset mankinds clock. The original terms used to divide time were AD (abbreviating the Latin Anno Domini or in the year of our Lord) and BC (Before Christ Christ being Greek for the Messiah).

While most people know why we measure time the way we do, you will seldom hear it mentioned. When the lighted ball drops in Times Square at midnight each New Year, theres always a lot of chatter. Yet in all the years I have watched that phenomenon, I have yet to hear even one celebrity reference what happened two thousand years ago to change our concept of time. Not one participant braving the cold night air in Manhattan, not a single musical guest, not one news commentator, not one host.

In fact, in the sixty-two years I have been alive, Ive never seen anyone in public life make the point I am attempting to drive home today that Jesus, or Yeshua, as He was known to His Hebrew brethren, is the one and only life in the history of humanity that changed everything even the way we count the years going by. (Not only that, we also use His earthly life to count the years before He came. We simply do it backward.)

I dont believe followers of Jesus make this point effectively enough. I dont even think we appreciate it enough. We rarely use it to share the good news that Jesus came to share, let alone underline it every chance we get. Clearly, we dont recognize how important it is to stave off efforts to popularize terms such as CE and BCE rather than BC and AD.

In short, we are not doing enough to remind believers and nonbelievers alike just how much its all about Jesus, the Alpha and the Omega, the Word, the Lamb of God, the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Neither do we talk much about the subject of this book: His second coming and what it portends.

Oh, I know, some of you dont believe in such things. You think its just a bunch of silly superstition. Even some Christians dont believe in the Second Coming.

But as a journalist, I cant ignore hard evidence no matter where it may lead me. And the more I study the prophetic scriptures of the Holy Bible and look at the condition of our world today, the more convinced I become that we are nearing that time. In fact, I think we are very close.

For just as Jesus virgin birth in Bethlehem was foretold by the Hebrew prophets hundreds of years earlier, so too was His return to earth predicted. The only question is when.

The most dramatic evidence for His imminent return that our generation has witnessed was the rebirth of the nation of Israel in 1948. The Jews, Gods chosen people, were, as prophesied, scattered over the whole earth for nearly two millennia beginning shortly after Jesus death on the cross. Yet, the Scriptures leave no doubt that the Jewish state would exist, once again, before He returned. (See Ezekiel 22:1415; Luke 21:24; cf. Ezekiel 34:13; 38:8.)

Interestingly, Orthodox Jews have long taught that the world would last for six thousand years before the Messiah would come and usher in a millennial period of restful human history. Since God created the world in six days (Gen. 1:31), and rested on the seventh day (Gen. 2:1), they reason that the worlds history would climax the same way. Specifically, they cite Psalms, which says, For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past (90:4).