March Madness begins next week. Fans all across the country will try to predict the winner of the 2016 NCAA basketball tournament. Last year Warren Buffet offered a billion dollar prize to anyone who was able to fill out a perfect NCAA bracket before it began. There were several million applicants, but no one claimed the prize. In fact everyone was disqualified after just 25 games – no one lasted more than 31 hours into the tournament.
No human being can accurately foretell the future; not the outcomes of college basketball games, not the fluctuations of the stock market, not even the exact weather conditions one week from today. But God can. Isaiah 46:9-10 reads, “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me. I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come.”
We see life like a little boy looking at a parade through a knothole in a fence. He has a faint memory of what has gone before, he sees only what is in front of him but he has no idea what’s coming next. God sees life as though He’s above the fence. Everything to Him is in the eternal present. He sees tomorrow as clearly as we see today.
One of the ways the Bible is proven to be the Word of God is that its prophecies are fulfilled. For example the Bible predicts that in the last days God would gather the Jewish people from all around the world back to Israel. “In that day the Lord will reach out his hand a second time to reclaim the surviving remnant of his people from Lower Egypt, from Upper Egypt, from Cush, from Elam, from Babylonia, from Hamath and from the Islands of the Mediterranean. He will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; he will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth” (Isaiah 11:11-12).
Notice Isaiah predicted there would be a second return of Jews to their homeland. The first was the return from Babylon in the days of Nehemiah and Ezra in 538 B.C. The second time there will be a remnant gathered from the four corners of the earth. In 1900 only about 40,000 Jewish people actually lived in the Holy Land. In 1948 Israel was declared a nation for the first time in over 1800 years and since then there has been a continuous migration back to the Israel from all over the globe. Today over half of the world’s estimated 14 million Jews are living in Israel.
Among those who have returned are thousands of African Jews from Ethiopia. Did you know that there has been a strong contingent of Jewish believers in Ethiopia for centuries? No one knows the origin of this group. Some suggest they are the descendants of the Queen of Sheba who visited Solomon and who may have returned to her homeland a convert. The Ethiopian Jews claim they are descendants of Solomon himself. The New Testament book of Acts (chapter 8) reports the treasurer of Ethiopia had traveled to Jerusalem to worship and was converted to Christ on his return journey.
In 1991 the political and economic stability of Ethiopia deteriorated, as rebels mounted attacks against and eventually controlled the capital city of Addis Ababa. Fearing for their survival, thousands of Ethiopian Jewish refugees gathered at the airport and sought permission to flee the country with the intent to settle in Israel. Initially their request was denied. But the Israeli government with some help from the United States put enough pressure on the Ethiopian officials that the refugees were granted a forty-eight hour window to migrate to Israel.
What followed was incredible. On May 24 and 25, 1991 an unprecedented airlift known as ‘Operation Solomon’ transported over 14,325 Ethiopian Jews (almost the entire Jewish Ethiopian community) to Israel in 36 hours on 34 Israeli planes. Commercial airliners were stripped of their seats so they could cram in as many refugees as possible onto the planes. (Pictured here)
The operation set a world record for a single-flight passenger load when an El Al 747 carried a registered 1,087 passengers to Israel, a five hour flight. (Some reports estimate there may have been as many as 1,122 passengers because dozens of children were reportedly hidden under their mothers’ cloaks.) When the plane landed there were two additional passengers on board because two babies were born en route!
Read what Jeremiah prophesied more than 2500 years ago. “See, I will…gather them from the ends of the earth. Among them will be the blind and the lame, expectant mothers and women in labor; a great throng will return. They will come with weeping; they will pray as I bring them back” (Jeremiah 31:8-9)
Joel Brinkley reported in The New York Times, “At the airport this morning, it was difficult to tell who was more joyful — the barefoot Ethiopians who cheered, …and bent down to kiss the tarmac as they stepped off the planes, or the Israelis who watched them aglow, marveling at this powerful image showing that their state still holds appeal, even with all its problems.”
”It was a very nice flight,” said one of the smiling immigrants, 29 year-old Mukat Abag. “We didn’t bring any of our clothes, we didn’t bring any of our things, but we are very glad to be here.”
Today Israel is home to the largest Beta Israel community in the world with about 125,500 citizens of Ethiopian descent. They are mainly assembled in the smaller urban areas of central Israel.
Simon Peter wrote, “We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you would do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place…Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:19-21).
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