What lies ahead? This question led me to put some- thing in at the very end of my book, The Mystery of the Shemitah that concerns a mystery so unique it actually gives the time parameters of when End-Time events take place. I titled it The Mystery of the Seventh Shemitah. In bib- lical times, every seventh year there was a Shemitah. But every seventh Shemitah ushered in a Super Shemitah known as the “Jubilee.”
The Jubilee was known as the year of restoration. If you lost your property, your ancestral home, your inheritance, your father’s possession, or your land, in the year of Jubilee, you got it back. You were restored. The law read: Everyone is to return to his property and to his family.
If any people on Earth have ever been especially sepa- rated from their ancestral home, their inheritance, their father’s possession, or their land, it is the Jewish People. Two thousand years ago the armies of Rome drove out the Jewish People from the Land of Israel and scattered them throughout the Earth. For 2,000 years they wandered the Earth hated, persecuted, nationless, and homeless.
And yet, if the Jubilee belonged to any people, it belongs to the Jewish People. Could the Jubilee, the ancient year of restoration, the return to the land one has lost, to one’s ancestral possession, actually hold the key to Israel’s pro- phetic restoration and End-Time events?
We know that the Jubilee must always fall in the year after a Shemitah. We can’t dogmatically say when the Jubilee falls, but we do know the timing of the Shemitah. So could the Shemitah lead us to the answer? For instance, the Shem- itah of 1917 ended in September 1917. The year following the Shemitah was September 1917 to September 1918. Could that be the time parameter that holds the key to a prophetic restoration of Israel?
For four centuries, the Land of Israel was held by an Islamic power, the Ottoman Turkish Empire. There was no way that the empire would restore the Land to the Jewish People. But in World War I, the empire began to collapse. The armies of the British Empire, under General Edmund Allenby, entered the Middle East and approached the Holy Land. The Turkish soldiers mistook Allenby’s name for “Allah Nebi”—“the messenger sent by Allah” who was com- ing to bring judgment. Allenby entered Jerusalem to find that the Turkish soldiers had fled in fear.
For the first time in 2,000 years, the Land of Israel was under the dominion of a power benevolent to the Jewish People. The British Empire issued the Balfour Declaration that established the land of “Palestine” as a Jewish home- land. It was a prophetic End-Time restoration, a Jubilee. As in the ancient Jubilee, Jewish People returned to the Land of their fathers, their long lost ancestral homeland with a clear hope of the “land reverting to the original owners.”
When did that happen? When was the Balfour Declara- tion made? In November 1917. In other words, the pro- phetic restoration of the Jewish People to their Land took place in the exact time parameters decreed by the year after the Shemitah—the Jubilee.
Now what happens if we go even further to find the Sev- enth Shemitah from that time, and the year following? Could it give us the key to another prophetic End-Time restoration?
By doing so, it takes us to the Hebrew year beginning in September 1966 to September 1967. Did anything signifi- cant take place around that time? On June 7, 1967, Israel was in the midst of the Six Day War. Israeli soldiers entered the Lion’s Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem. They made their way to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount.
In 70 A.D. the Jewish People lost Jerusalem. Now, after 2,000 years it was restored to them. They returned to their ancestral possession—Jubilee. And when did that take place? It happened right in the parameters determined by the Seventh Shemitah from the restoration of the land—the second prophetic Jubilee, and in the exact time parameters.
So when is the next Seventh Shemitah? Counting seven Shemitahs from the last cycle brings us to the year 2015. The corresponding prophetic year would be September 2015 to September 2016. The cycle doesn’t have to con- tinue but if it did, what would that mean? In each of the two cycles, it meant war, war in the Middle East. War concern- ing the nation of Israel, ending with a major restoration of End-Time prophecy.
Whether or not the phenomenon of the Seventh Shemi- tah continues, we can say this: God is on the throne. God is over and in charge of all things. He’s the God of mercy and restoration. He’s the God of hope and it’s His will to restore. He never forgets His People. And when He makes a prom- ise, He fulfills it. And when He does, He’s perfectly on time.
