For almost 20 centuries the prophetic signs of Christ’s return were so rare and sporadic that they were like a stray raindrop falling from a mostly clear sky. Something could be felt but no one was sure what it was because the conditions in the atmosphere did not indicate rain was imminent. Starting in about 1897 however the prophetic clouds began to gather more abundantly and now In 2024 the world is being hit with end times signs so powerful they are more resembling meteor showers than rain showers. What was the impetus for this end-times explosion of signs? How can we be sure that what we are witnessing is the fulfillment of the last days' prophesies of the Bible? The answer can be summed up in one word. ISRAEL!
GOD’S SOVEREIGNTY
The one thing we must understand in order for all of history and all of the Bible and even the purpose of Israel to be understood in proper context is that God is completely sovereign. Nothing happens by chance in regard to the unfolding of history. I look at humanity and our world throughout time like I view my daughter’s aquarium she had when she was a child. We decided when to buy it and set it up. We chose the fish that went inside the tank. We chose the colorful decor and decorative stones inside the tank. We fed the fish and cleaned up the tank as needed. That tank and those fish were always completely within our control. And when the day came we decided to sell the tank and the fish to someone else, we chose the day and time.
Now inside the tank, the fish may have been oblivious to us. They were free to swim around and eat the food when they chose and enjoy the little caverns and castles we placed in their world. They could enjoy other fish and live a nice fish life with no concern about anything outside the tank. But the reality was that we totally held those fish and their world in our hands and it was us that controlled every aspect of their lives and future. They just didn’t know it or even care.
History is like that. God planned it all and sustains it all. We do have freedom but the freedoms we have are only within the parameters and confines of the world God has placed us in. He provides for us and gives us breath and numbers our days so that He knows our end from our beginning even if we do not know. It is exactly the same situation with the nation of Israel.
God created humanity for His pleasure and for His purposes. He did the same with His creation of Israel.
Although it is not a popular concept within the Arminian Church today, God creates good and brings disaster. He creates good because He is good and He wants to bless His creation with all the joys and blessings He can pour on them.
(Gen 1:31 a) “ Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.”
But… He also is the one who creates disaster because it is necessary for the discipline of His wayward creation and also to keep history moving to its predetermined end.
(Isaiah 45:7) “I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create calamity; I, the LORD, do all these things.”
Now this is not to say that all the bad things that happen are because God orchestrates them. Surely not. There is sin that is allowed to exist in this spec of time for a reason. It has its purpose. And it is allowed by God for a short season compared to all eternity and that reason in a nutshell is so God can bring honor to His Son, create a bride of faithful redeemed humanity for His Son, and through God’s allowance of Sin it allows Him to display all of His amazing qualities that we would never know without sin’s brief existence. Yet the Bible says God is not the author of sin.
(James 1:13 ) “Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am being tempted by God,' for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one".
There is also an evil realm led by Satan that seeks to kill and harm.
(1 Peter 5:8) “Be sober-minded, be alert. Your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for anyone he can devour.”
Yet sin and the Satanic realm have a purpose that all fits under the perfect Sovereignty of God’s ultimate plan:
How for instance could we possibly know what mercy is without God displaying it to sinners in an imperfect world? How could we know what God’s wrath is like if there were none fallen to receive His wrath? How could we experience God’s grace without sin preventing us from deserving God’s blessings? How could we fathom the love of Christ without the Cross where our Lord willfully paid for sin on our behalf? How could we see God’s mighty power to utterly destroy evil if not for the sinful kingdom of Satan? Sin has a reason as does the adversary. And because sin is in us and Satan is In the world there is evil that God doesn’t create but He allows for a purpose. But make no mistake, it all exists and is allowed by God’s sovereign choice and it will be eliminated fully when He says the word.
I bring all this up because while this world appears to be spinning out of control into utter madness, it is exactly the place God knew it would be in the year of our Lord 2024 AD. God not only knew it would be like this, but He planned for it to be like this. He planned this world’s end before He even created it. How do we know? Because He told us exactly that in His Word!
PROMISE OF A SAVIOR
In Genesis 3:15 ( right after sin entered the Garden of Eden) God promised Humanity He would send a Savior to defeat Satan and reverse the Curse which God had placed on the world!
“And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
We know this Savior was Jesus Christ and we also know this wasn’t a plan God created on the fly after man chose to sin but that God had planned this before humanity was created. Rev 13:8 says that the whole world will worship the beast during the Tribulation because they were not written in the Book of the Lamb who was slain BEFORE the foundations of the world were set by God.
Rev 13:8 “All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”
This means God planned for Christ to save the world before man was even created. That is true Sovereignty, my friends! God is in control. And because He is in control He doesn’t leave his plan up to pure chance or simply react as needed. He is a precise God and His sovereign Providence is constantly moving through History fulfilling all His Divine Will in spite of our freedom. Again, like the fish in the aquarium, we have freedom, but it’s all under the auspices of God’s complete sovereign reign over history.
THE FAMILY OF THE SAVIOR
Now because God knew, and planned the need for Jesus to come before the foundation of the world, He also knew and planned the people group from which Jesus would come. The family of a man named Abraham.
(Gen 12:1-4a) “The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people, and your father’s household to the land I will show you.
2 “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you;I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; “
This is where many in the Church age take a wrong turn in their understanding of our world. God promises here to bless Abraham through the great nation he would father. That nation is Israel as we will delve into. God also promises here to bless all the people of the world ( both Jew and Gentile ) through Abraham’s faith which does indeed include the Church.
(Isaiah 49:6-7) “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant, to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
However … the promise to bless the world does not mean God will replace the great nation He created out of Abraham. It means the blessings to that nation will spread out through the world to all peoples and thus, Abraham will be the recipient of offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky. physical descendants from his children the Jews; And spiritual descendants through both Jews and Gentiles in the Church.
God went on to describe the events that would initiate the physical descendants :
(Gen 15:4-5) “Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man (a servant in his household) will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”
The Muslim world likes to hijack this promise just like much of the Church does . They claim that the son of Abraham to inherit the promises would be Ishmael because he was the first son of Abraham although not by Sarah. But God specifically deals with that objection as well.
(Gen 17: 15-19) “God also said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.” Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” And Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!” Then God said, “Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him."
The promises would not come through Abraham’s son Ishmael conceived through human planning (although God would bless Him with nations as well ) but would come through Isaac.
(Genesis 21: 1-3) "Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore him."
(Genesis 21:12b) “…Listen to whatever Sarah tells you, because it is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.”
Now if God knew which man to call who would form this new nation, and He knew which child would be the one that would bring forth the line that would bring the Savior of Gen 3:15 into the world, would the future children of Abraham through Isaac be chosen in any less exact way? Hardly!
-God chose the second born, Jacob, to be the heir over his older brother Esau who sold Jacob His birthright.
-God gave Jacob a new name, “Israel”, and made his 12 sons the fathers of the eternal tribes of Israel.
-God allowed one of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, to be sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt to preserve the family through severe famine.
Joseph rose to second in command in Egypt, (2nd only to Pharaoh) and his Godly wisdom saved the people of the region. But after 400 years the Jews had become slaves in Egypt to ensuing Pharaohs who feared the growing numbers of Israel’s children. The people cried out and God raised up Moses to deliver them to freedom.
Now God had foreseen all this as well and in fact, had told Abraham this exact thing when He was showing him all the land that would belong to His Israeli descendants.
(Gen 15:13)“God said to Abram, “Know for sure that your descendants will be strangers [living temporarily] in a land (Egypt) that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years.”
Moses answered the call and led the Israeli slaves to freedom on their way to the promised land God had previously given Abraham for His chosen descendants (read Genesis 15).
On the way to their new home, the 12 tribes were given the Law and a sacrificial system to follow in order to keep their sinful state ever before them (as lawbreakers) and to see their need for a Sacrifice that would take away their continual sin. (The perpetual need for endless animal sacrifices was required because none could truly take away sin. They could only point to the need for a final worthy sacrifice which God would provide )
The need for a final sacrifice who would save humanity and fulfill Gen 3:15 was also pictured for Abraham in Gen 22 when God told Him to sacrifice Isaac but then substituted a ram with His head caught in thorns in Isaac’s place. The angel’s words “God will provide the sacrifice” were our eternal clue that the messiah would be that sacrifice and was the one the coming Jewish sacrificial system would point to. It also pointed to the substitutionary atonement Christ would provide as He was crucified once as a substitute for sinners who would believe in Him.
After a few detours, the 12 tribes finally came into their promised land some 40 years after leaving Egypt and God began working through a series of judges and then kings and prophets, through unlikely twists and turns and even a temporary banishment from their land, to guide history toward its rendezvous with the Savior of humanity …Jesus Christ!
THE OLD TESTAMENT PROPHECIES
The Old Testament is full of prophesies that outline the characteristics of the one who would be the savior. They detail where He would be born. (Micah 5:2) That His mother would be a virgin (Isaiah 7:14) and His father would be God ( 2 Sam 7:14) . That He is from eternity past. (Isaiah 9:6-7) He would suffer and die at His first visit (Isaiah 53) but He would come a second time to set up a 1000-year reign on earth over which He would be King. (Hosea 6:2)
The prophecies are numerous and very specific. And here is where we get to the main point of this whole article. The Messiah's coming was planned from the beginning. His two-part mission was to A) conquer sin spiritually at His first visitation and B)conquer the world physically during His second visitation. The First Coming was to save the world from its lost state. The second coming will be to judge the lost world, save Israel, and set up a kingdom He will rule over as King of the world restoring the earth to its Eden-like state. All the prophecies of both these visits are contained in the prophecies of the Jewish prophets and all must come to pass 100% or else God was less than honest with the nation of Israel thousands of years ago which Is impossible.
(Numbers 23:19 ) “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?”
Remember the earlier points about God’s sovereignty. Many will say that God made promises conditional for Israel and they failed in their faithfulness so God changed the plan. Uh, that is utterly ridiculous. God knew the outcome before He made his promises to Israel. And His outcomes are always directed through His providence so that His will is ultimately done. God made the law because it set His Holy standard. We all break that law but that doesn’t mean God abandons us. He made a way for lost humanity to be saved despite our Lawbreaking. That way is through His Son Jesus Christ who fulfilled every jot and tittle of the law on our behalf.
(Matthew 5:17)
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
And if He fulfilled the Law in our place to be our substitute for both atonement of sin and imputation of righteousness at His first coming …He will also fulfill all the Written Word pertaining to His global Lordship and Kingly reign over Israel at His second coming.
(Matthew 5:17-18 )
“For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished.”
And … if all this is true, and it is, then that means Israel still has a guaranteed date with destiny as the benefactor of Jesus returns to rule on David’s throne in Jerusalem as King of a mighty renewed Israeli nation. Of course, the enemy knows this and has been trying to destroy the Jews for thousands of years to keep Christ’s second coming from happening and to stop God’s Word from all being fulfilled.
CONFUSION ABOUT ISRAEL
So how have things gotten so confusing about the importance of Israel and the purpose of Jesus' second coming? Well, several reasons. Here are a few:
A) People misunderstand the nature of the duel prophecies. They see it as one event when the Messiah’s two necessary visitations are packed into one passage.
Example: Isaiah 61:1-4
1 “The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners,
2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn,
3 and provide for those who grieve in Zion—to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.
4 They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated; they will renew the ruined cities that have been devastated for generations.”
Jesus fulfilled the first part of this passage at His first coming. That fulfillment ended in verse 2 with the words “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor …” Jesus Himself read this passage to the crowd in His hometown of Nazareth in Luke 4:14-21 and they attempted to stone Him for obviously proclaiming Himself to be Messiah. But … He didn’t complete the reading because the rest of this passage deals with His second coming after Israel has been decimated for centuries and has to be called back to their land to restore the nation. It obviously couldn’t be about the return from Babylon because that happened centuries before Jesus came. This is talking about His second coming after Israel has been returned to their land a second time. But it is bunched together with a prophesy about His first incarnation which is misunderstood by the Jews.
B) Israel misunderstands the dual role of the Messiah.
The Jews long awaited their Messiah and still are waiting today. That is because they chose to cling to their sacrificial system (which could never truly save ) as their justification and only desired a Messiah that would be like David who would be a political king and would deliver Israel from their enemies and elevate their kingdom to greatness in the world of nations. They failed to see that their sacrificial system was only a road sign pointing to the finished work Messiah would provide at His first coming. Isaiah 53 (which describes perfectly the purpose of Jesus' incarnation and His death on the cross as the fulfillment of the sacrificial system ) is completely misinterpreted by Jewish Rabbis to describe Israel’s suffering and they normally ignore the passage altogether because it’s not understood due to their spiritual blindness.
C) Most of the church totally misses the point of Paul’s sermon in Romans 11 and transfers the blessings of Israel to the church, completely skewing prophecy and making the Bible impossible to understand in their allegorical system.
Since Israel was leveled and scattered in 70 AD and for nearly two millennia their land lay abandoned and desolate, the world and the Church assumed God was done with His chosen people. In actuality, this was the exact scenario Jesus spoke of in the last part of Isaiah 61 and in the parable of the talents.
“For it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted to them his property. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them, and he made five talents more. So also he who had the two talents made two talents more. But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master's money. Now after a long time, the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them." Matthew 25:14-19
Jesus is the man going on the journey (back to Heaven ) and the servants are His Church. He is clear to point out in verse 19 that it would be “after a long time “ that He returns. So when this is tied back in with Isaiah 61 and the restoration of Israel’s long abandoned land, it should have been understood that the Jews would be in the Diaspora for a long time. But somehow the church (both Catholic and the reformers ) chose to just usurp God’s blessings to Israel and claim them for the Church. And that is a deadly mistake when trying to make sense of how history is unfolding. Because Israel is the key to understanding the timing of Christ’s second coming to establish His throne!
“And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. Isaiah 11:11-12
Paul tells us in Romans 11 that Israel was set aside for the salvation of the Gentiles, and then she will be grafted back into her purpose as God’s favored nation. Until that moment in time, Israel would be preserved in their unique ethnicity so they could be returned as pure Jews after God’s work with the Church was through. And then God will restore them as Ezekiel 37 lays out and prepare them for Messiah's second coming and His rule over the world.
(Romans 11:25-28) “For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. 26 And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: "The Deliverer will come out of Zion, And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob; 27 For this is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins." 28 Concerning the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but concerning the election they are beloved for the sake of the fathers."
GOD’S TIMEPIECE
Hal Lindsey has referred to Israel as “God’s divine timepiece “ because we can tell where we are in history by what is happening with That tiny Jewish nation. So… back to the first paragraph of this article, for centuries we could
Not tell exactly where we were in history because, after AD 70, Israel was not there. The Church was given the command by Jesus to take the Gospel to all the world and then sometime after that, the end would come. So that is how history has unfolded. But it did so with blinders on because there was no Divine clock on the wall to tell us where we were on God’s schedule.
But then in 1897, the First Zionist Congress meeting took place in Switzerland and set the ball rolling on the re-establishment of a Jewish nation with a homeland.
In 1917 Lord Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration. The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British Government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917. (Source Wikipedia)
And soon thereafter came the atrocities of Nazi Germany and Hitler’s Attempt to exterminate the European Jews all across the continent in WW2.
But out of this evil plot of genocide came the momentum needed to gather enough support for the fulfillment of one of the most amazing and unlikely prophecies in scripture to finally be fulfilled some 2600 years after Isaiah first penned the words :
(Isaiah 66: 8) “Who has ever heard of such things? Who has ever seen things like this? Can a country be born in a day or a nation be brought forth in a moment? Yet no sooner is Zion in labor than she gives birth to her children.”
And just like that the dry bones of Ezekiel began rattling as the nation of Israel has been physically brought back together like the bones of a skeleton in an archeologist's lab.
THE SIGN
May 14, 1948, was the day Israel was reborn as a nation. No other conquered nation has ever had such a thing happen after 2 millennia.
This was the Great sign the world needed to know where we are on God’s prophetic timeline.
We know that in 444 BC Artaxerxes made the proclamation to let the Jews return from their first exile and 483 years later Jesus Christ was hanged on a cross for the sin of the world just as Daniel had been told in Daniel’s 70-week prophecy (Dan 9:27). We also know there are seven years left to fulfill the rest of that two-part prophecy in Daniel and that those seven years will be called the “Time of Jacob’s Trouble!”
(Jeremiah 30:7) “How awful that day will be! No other will be like it. It will be a time of trouble for Jacob, but he will be saved out of it.”
And THAT is the reason God has preserved Israel for all these millennia. He is preparing to save them as a nation even after they rejected their Messiah the first time He came. God’s promises never fail though our human ones do.
He promised to punish Israel for their unbelief which He has for 2000 years and will
Culminate it in the Tribulation period but out of that chastening, He will save His chosen nation and fulfill the Davidic Covenant (2 Sam 7) by seating Jesus Christ on the throne of David for 1000 years.
He will also punish the nations for their stored-up sin of rebellion and mistreatment of Israel by bringing all the nations into the valley of Jehosephat for Christ’s triumphant return and judgment!
(Joel 3) “In those days and at that time, when I restore the fortunes of Judah and Jerusalem,
I will gather all nations and bring them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. There I will put them on trial for what they did to my inheritance, my people Israel, because they scattered my people among the nations and divided up my land.”
This is what the ancient Jewish prophets saw coming and it is what they wanted Messiah to do at His first coming: They wanted punishment for the Romans who were sovereign over the Israeli state and they wanted messiah to lead them to freedom and dominance as a kingdom. They didn’t however want a spiritual Savior Messiah interfering with their sacrificial system and religious hierarchy.
Today’s modern Church is mostly just the opposite. They want the baby in a manger Messiah who pays for sins but they don’t want the conquering king and great warrior that will return to a throne in Jerusalem and rule the world with an iron rod and judge the wickedness of the nations!
The majority of the world is dull to the incredible sign that restored Israel now represents to us. But watchers know what is happening.
Because Israel is back, God's timeline is falling perfectly into place. That giant blinking neon sign “ISRAEL” tells us that all the other signs will soon follow. And what do we see now developing over the last 75 years of Israel’s existence?
World government forming as the final beast system foretold in Daniel 7 and Revelation 13.
Global digital currency is ready to be rolled out allowing Mark of the Beast Technology foretold in Revelation 13.
AI being mastered to allow the Image of The Beast spoken of in Revelation 13.
The revival of paganism and the blending of religions and environmentalism to form the Harlot religion of the Tribulation foretold in Revelation 17.
lawlessness abounding as foretold in 2 Thess 2.
Evil being considered good and Goodness being rejected as evil as Isaiah forewarned about in 5:20.
Sexual perversion becoming the new morality as in the days of Sodom. Jesus warned of this “Days of Lot” scenario in Luke 17.
All the old borders and economies being crushed and destroyed as the new Beast system is being formed which was foretold in Daniel 7.
The growing world hatred for the Judeo-Christian World View and Israel’s God as foreseen in Psalm 2.
Anti-semitism growing globally to a fever pitch as the OT prophets predicted such as Zech 12:2
The world decrying the need for a covenant in the Middle East to finally bring supposed peace and security, as Daniel 9:27 foretells, was called Israel’s Covenant with Death in Isaiah 28:18.
The list goes on and on …
Everything appears ready for the Antichrist to enter stage left and come on the scene to supply the dazzling solutions this broken and desperate planet will eagerly accept. But one thing is holding Him back. The presence of the Restrainer (The Holy Spirit) in Christ’s Church must first be removed at the Rapture and then all Hell can break loose on the earth and Israel will finally see the last seven years of Daniel’s 490-year prophesy fulfilled.
It will be tragic and deadly for Israel and for the world but God will faithfully secure His Jewish remnant through the fire and when it’s at the end they will cry out to their Messiah and He will return to save them and set up her promised glorious kingdom.
Jesus knew He was only days from being rejected and killed by His chosen people yet He promised Israel He would return to save them on the day they would recognize who He was and cry to Him for Help.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ Matthew 23:37-39
CONCLUSION
Israel is right where God planned for them to be at this moment in time. They are not abandoned. They are not an afterthought. They are not there by pure chance. They are not replaced and they are not rejected. They are regathered and God is using them to finish history and bring His precious and mighty Son to the throne of David to rule the entire world and fulfill all the remaining prophecies. God used them to bring the Messiah the first time and He is using them to bring the Messiah again the second time. Israel’s glory is just ahead. But just like all of us she must humble herself to the only Savior that God promised way back in Genesis 3:15. The storm is approaching fast. And Israel will soon fulfill all Her intended role.
“And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son.” Zech 12:10